All posts tagged power

Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

It was usually the same. He started by holding himself aloof, then gradually he let himself get mixed in, and then he had revulsions.
(Lawrence’s alter-ego Richard Somers, painfully aware of the trajectory all his relationships follow)

Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness…
(One of many passages which vividly convey the strangeness of the Australian landscape)

In his critical biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess calls ‘Kangaroo’ ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It is a strange book, long and rambling, full of mad obsessions but also wonderful delights. I’d say it’s made up of about five elements.

Plot There’s a sort of plot in the sense that things happen, but that’s the least important element.

Dialogue There’s a lot of dialogue and conversations, which I think Lawrence was really bad at. Almost any other novelist I can think of writes better dialogue. Every Lawrence character sounds like Lawrence and their verbal duels are often painfully contrived and sometimes incomprehensible.

Australia There are lots of descriptions of Australia, the Australian countryside, sky, bush, towns and people, which are truly inspired, wonderfully vivid, put you right there, magical.

Politics At one point the novel rotates around the figure of a would-be political revolutionary, Ben Cooley, who runs a secret organisation of political radicals and whose codename is Kangaroo which gives the novel its title. With this figure and his acolyte Jack Callcott, Richard Lovat Somers, the character who is transparently Lawrence’s avatar within the novel, has numerous conversations on Big Topics of the Day. These include:

the meaning of life (growth and change)
the nature of love (mainly between men; the famous Australian mateship: ‘Men fight better when they’ve got a mate. They’ll stand anything when they’ve got a mate,’ says Jack)
contemporary politics (static and inadequate)

These are all beguiling and the political discussions shed an oblique light on the history of the day (the Bolsheviks had been in power less than five years, in May 1922 Mussolini was barely heard of, hadn’t undertaken his famous march on Rome (October 1922)). Parallel to Cooley, is the figure of Willie Struthers, head of the Labour movement (described by the papers as communist, and he says he wants to establish a soviet of workers). Theoretically, Somers is caught in the force field between these two opposing political standpoints although, in practice, Kangaroo, the more prominent figure, has a weirdly under-developed ideology which mostly consists of vague spiritual uplift about love.

Portrait of a marriage The central couple, Richard Lovat Somers and his wife Harriet, are transparently based on Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. On a gossipy level, it’s fascinating to read such vivid descriptions of their humdrum domestic life, with plumping of cushions and laying of the venerable table cloth they’ve carried through all their travels. I was interested in the precise content of their meals, something which was irritatingly absent from all the previous Lawrence novels I’d read (‘They had tea and toast and quince jam’). On a more meaningful level, it’s fun to watch the interplay between the married couple, in particular the way the down-to-earth Harriet-Frieda is always puncturing Lovat-Lawrence’s pretensions, moods and high-falutin’ rhetoric:

‘You’re never happy unless you’re upsetting somebody’s apple-cart.’

‘Ah, why was I ever pestered with such a viperish husband as you!’

‘I’ve got one thing to tell you. Without me you’d be nowhere, you’d be nothing, you’d not be that,’ and she snapped her fingers under his nose.

‘I feel it’s my fate to go now.”
‘Ha, your fate!’ said Harriet. ‘It’s always your fate with you. If it was me it would be my foolish restlessness.’ (p.317)

‘It’s really shameful. Men are like impish children — you daren’t leave them together for a minute.’ (p.322)

‘He’s always breaking his heart over something—anything except me. To me he’s a nether millstone.’ (p.383)

So he had preached at her, like a dog barking, barking senselessly. And oh, how it had annoyed her. (p.387)

Self portrait It’s obvious from the start that the character of Richard Lovat Somers contains a good deal of introspective description of Lawrence himself but it’s still a big surprise when the second half of the book blossoms into a massive act of self revelation. The most important thing about the character is his wish to be utterly alone, solitary, not enmeshed in anyone else’s business. In fact the central theme or drama of the novel really derives from his inner conflict, between the invitation to join the secret organisation, which Jack and Cooley offer him and his great temptation to do so, to act in the world, to make a difference – conflicting with his profound need to keep himself pure, aloof, intact and separate. It’s only in the long revelatory chapter, ‘Nightmare’, that describes in unsparing detail the humiliations Lawrence was subjected to during the First World War, that the book completely changes tone and we realise the traumatic experiences which lie behind Lawrence’s wish to flee, to fly, to leave behind cloying, wretched, bullying humanity.

(Incidentally, the initials RLS seem like a deliberate homage to that other great British exile to the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson.)

Types of power

Alternatively, seen from a different angle, you could say it is a novel about power, about different types of power exercised in different arenas, from the individual, through relationships, to the political and then onto the geographical. From this point of view, the novel contains extended meditations on:

the sources of life and agency in the individual, using Somers’ many ponderings on his own nature and wish for self control, mixed with…
the power of change, evolution, the dying off of the old, birth of the new, as outlined by Cooley
power in marriage, with chapter 9 being entirely dedicated to a fanciful, metaphor-laden analysis of Lawrence and Frieda’s marriage (marriage compared, at length, and with heavy humour, to an ocean-going vessel, ‘the good ship Harriet and Lovat)
mateship i.e the very powerful bond between men, much deeper than the love between men and women, the love-hate relationship with Jack Callcott and then the really deep attraction-repulsion with Cooley – a subject Lawrence writes obsessively about in ‘Women in Love’, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and here
the sources of political power, exemplified in two figures:
- Ben Cooley, with his quasi-military, proto-fascist organisation of ex-servicemen, the Diggers
- Willie Struthers who, as far as I could tell, runs New South Wales’ socialist party
chapter 11 is devoted to a detailed comparison between the two men and their philosophies of life, as explained in extended conversations with Somers, who compares Cooley to Napoleon and Struthers to Lenin
the power of the British state as described at length in the long Nightmare chapter listing the suspicions, interrogations, searches and stripping Lawrence was subjected to by the agents of the wartime England he came to loathe
the power of the land – behind puny human worries likes the landscape of Australia which Lawrence, like so many visitors to it, experiences as profoundly old, ancient, secret and impenetrable

Richard Aldington’s factual introduction

Richard Aldington was a poet and biographer, who knew Lawrence well during the latter’s London phase at the end of the Great War. Years later he contributed short introductions to the Penguin editions of the classic novels. In the introduction to ‘Kangaroo’ he gives the timeline behind the novel’s composition:

Lawrence and Frieda were living on Sicily when, at the end of 1921, they received an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to join her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico, in the south-western United States. Rather than cross the Atlantic they decided to go the long way, taking ship in February 1922 across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, stopping at Ceylon in March and staying just long enough not to like the tropics.

The arrived in Perth at the start of May 1922. On 15 May Lawrence wrote a letter saying they’d been staying for a fortnight at a place called Darlington, 15 miles south of Perth. Here he met local writer Mollie Skinner who showed him a manuscript of a novel she’d written. Lawrence recognised its amateur nature but was taken by its detailed knowledge of Australian flora, fauna and landscape and he agreed to help rewrite it. The result was the novel ‘The Boy in the Bush’, credited to both of them and part of Lawrence’s official oeuvre.

After a fortnight or so they took a boat round the coast to Sydney, arriving 26 May. Lawrence stayed here just two days, before removing to a rented cottage in the small mining town of Thirroul 30 miles south of Sydney. On June 3 he wrote a letter saying he’d commenced writing a new novel. Letters written to various correspondents throughout June indicate that he was racing on with it. By 3 July he wrote in his diary that he’d nearly finished it. In other words, he wrote some 150,000 words in a month!

Aldington makes the point that Lawrence’s great novels of the 1910s, like ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, were worked over and over, written and rewritten, to create a greater and greater sense of depth and primordial power. By stark contrast, the novels of the 1920s like ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and ‘Kangaroo’ were what Aldington calls ‘improvisations’. Lawrence set off without any idea where he was going to end and busked it from chapter to chapter. They eventually have endings and a narrative arc of a sort but never acquire the primordial depth of the classics. Lawrence was in such a hurry that he delivered manuscripts of both novels to the printers without corrections, leading to errors which have been reproduced down the years.

All this sounds very ramshackle, almost amateurish and yet Aldington emphasises the benefits of the improvisation approach, namely that Lawrence wrote with tremendous spontaneity, giving the texts what he calls ‘magical freshness and immediacy’. And, as Anthony Burgess points out more than once in his critical biography of Lawrence, it often feels like you are in the workshop, watching Lawrence hammer out his phrases, sentences, paragraphs and pages. Lawrence’s prose is not so much to be analysed as jumped aboard and ridden.

What is weak about the novel in terms of character and structure is compensated for, so the argument goes, by the extraordinary vividness of the descriptions and the general atmosphere of Australia, which Lawrence captured with uncanny skill, seeing as he was there for such a short period of time.

The Australian landscape

The novel includes countless descriptions of Australia, its eerie loneliness and ‘manlessness’. Here’s a sample, describing what the protagonist Richard Lovat Somers sees looking out the window of a train he’s travelling in.

That curious sombreness of Australia, the sense of oldness, with the forms all worn down low and blunt, squat. The squat-seeming earth. And then they ran at last into real country rather rocky, dark old rocks, and sombre bush with its different pale-stemmed dull-leaved gum-trees standing graceful, and various healthy looking undergrowth, and great spikey things like zuccas. As they turned south they saw tree-ferns standing on one knobbly leg among the gums, and among the rocks ordinary ferns and small bushes spreading in glades and up sharp hill-slopes. It was virgin bush, and as if unvisited, lost, sombre, with plenty of space, yet spreading grey for miles and miles, in a hollow towards the west. Far in the west, the sky having suddenly cleared, they saw the magical range of the Blue Mountains. And all this hoary space of bush between. The strange, as it were, invisible beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision. You feel you can’t see — as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape. For the landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so aloof. Somers always felt he looked at it through a cleft in the atmosphere; as one looks at one of the ugly-faced, distorted aborigines with his wonderful dark eyes that have such a incomprehensible ancient shine in them, across gulfs of unbridged centuries.

And captures the shanty shallowness of Australian towns, in this case a place named Wolloona.

It was a wonderful Main Street, and, thank heaven, out of the wind. There were several large but rather scaring brown hotels, with balconies all round: there was a yellow stucco church with a red-painted tin steeple, like a weird toy: there were high roofs and low roofs, all corrugated iron: and you came to an opening, and there, behold, were one or two forlorn bungalows inside their wooden palings, and then the void. The naked bush, sinking in a hollow to a sort of marsh, and then down the coast some sort of ‘works’, brick-works or something, smoking. All as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay, busy but not rooted in. As if none of the houses had any foundations.

Bright the sun, the air of marvellous clarity, tall stalks of cabbage palms rising in the hollow, and far off, tufted gum trees against a perfectly new sky, the tufts at the end of wire branches. And farther off, blue, blue hills. In the Main Street, large and expensive motor-cars and women in fuzzy fur coats; long, quiescent Australian men in tired-out-looking navy blue suits trotting on brown ponies, with a carpet-bag in one hand, doing the shopping; girls in very much-made hats, also flirtily shopping; three boys with big, magnificent bare legs, lying in a sunny corner in the dust; a lonely white pony hitched as if forever to a post at a street-corner.

And Harriet loves the half-built, half-abandoned, unfinished feel of these places.

Synopsis

The novel opens with Richard Lovat Somers and his wife, Harriet in Sydney, Australia. They are getting a hansom cab from their temporary digs to a house he’s rented for three months at number 51 Murdoch Street. Somers is transparently Lawrence (a writer and essayist), Harriet is Frieda. They are both dismayed that the house has a vulgar name, Torestin i.e. to-rest-in. Their neighbours are Jack Callcott and wife, Victoria.

Somers feels a long way from England and is madly homesick. He’s bursting with observations about Australians, the most salient of which is that the strong rule which is required in England seems quite unnecessary here. There is more genuine equality.

Somers for the first time felt himself immersed in real democracy — in spite of all disparity in wealth. The instinct of the place was absolutely and flatly democratic, à terre democratic. Demos was here his own master, undisputed, and therefore quite calm about it.

These thoughts about the political and social setup of Australia establish the importance of politics which is what the novel turns out to be about.

Harriet and Richard take a trip to Manly, one of Sydney’s bathing suburbs where they admire the youth sunbathing and splashing in the sea, before bumping into Jack and Victoria who invite them for tea with the latter’s sister and her husband, William James Trewhella (Cornish name). The Callcotts give the Somers a lift back to the house in their car, and Victoria and Harriet knock up a high tea.

Weeks pass. The couple get friendly. The woman play music – Victoria plays the piano and Harriet sings – while the men play chess, Jack treating it more like checkers. One night Jack Callcott buttonholes Somers about politics: does he want to see the power of capital smashed? So I think he’s some kind of socialist.

After a series of conversations establishing trust between the two men, Jack reveals that he’s part of a secret political organisation. They are concerned about the future of Australia. They want to overthrow the old rotten democracy and establish rule by strong men, men who know how to give and obey orders. Most of them are servicemen who served in the Great War, whose slang name is ‘diggers’. They are divided into small groups (Diggers’ clubs) and the overall leader is a man nicknamed Kangaroo = Benjamin ‘Ben’ Cooley:

Eyes set close together behind his pince-nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short-cropped dark hair and a smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands didn’t quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping shoulders, took away from his height.

Somers has a bee in his bonnet that Cooley is Jewish.

Surely, thought Somers, it is Jewish blood. The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to make the corpuscles of the blood glow. And after the smile his face went stupid and kangaroo-like, pendulous, with the eyes close together above the long, drooping nose. But the shape of the head was very beautiful, small, light, and fine. The man had surely Jewish blood. And he was almost purely kind, essential kindliness, embodied in an ancient, unscrupulous shrewdness. He was so shrewd, so clever. And with a rogue or a mean man, absolutely unscrupulous. But for any human being who showed himself sincere and vulnerable, his heart was pure in kindness. An extraordinary man. This pure kindliness had something Jehovah-like in it.

Cooley is characterised by a rarified type of love for his fellow men. Later Lawrence puts these words into Cooley’s mouth:

‘You are hopelessly facile, Lovat,’ he said gently. ‘In the first place, the greatest danger to the world to-day is anarchy, not bolshevism. It is anarchy and unrule that are coming on us — and that is what I, as an order-loving Jew and one of the half-chosen people, do not want. I want one central principle in the world: the principle of love, the maximum of individual liberty, the minimum of human distress…’ (p.230)

Cooley is a deep thinker, with the charisma of a prophet. His basic premise is to do with the life force. Life continually changes. Here he is explaining it to Somers:

‘The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. It is a subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we are. And there lies the pain. Because man builds himself in to his old house of life, builds his own blood into the roads he lays down, and to break from the old way, and to change his house of life, is almost like tearing him to pieces.’

Which is why people need help, need a leader who is like a father to help them into the new way of living.

‘Man needs to be reassured and suggested into his new issues. And he needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn’t know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself. Man again needs a father — not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti-life. I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life, and to shelter mankind from the madness and the evil of anti-life.’

He is against any belief or form being set in stone. Beliefs must change and evolve, have their day and die. Those who try to trap, fix and petrify it are the enemies of life.

‘Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers — look at those hibiscus — they don’t want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy. But they won’t. They will quietly, gently wither. And I love them for it. And so should all creeds, all gods, quietly and gently curl up and wither as their evening approaches. That is the only way of true holiness, in my opinion… There is a principle of evil. The principle of resistance. Malignant resistance to the life principle.’

Fear of foreigners / xenophobia

BUT it isn’t all lovely veneration of the life force. On a more human, social level, Jack Callcott (not Cooley) also expresses fear about Australia’s future, the very specific fear of being overrun by non-white races. I’m going to quote at length so you get the full tone of xenophobia, of the paranoia about being invaded and conquered and enslaved by dark-skinned foreigners, which really fuels Jack’s politics. Here he is explaining it all to Somers who, caught up in this sudden impassioned friendship with Callcott, enthusiastically agrees:

‘Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and the will of the people. Look at the country — going rottener every day, like an old pear.’
‘All the democratic world the same.’
‘Of course it’s the same. And you may well say Australian soil is waiting to be watered with blood. It’s waiting to be watered with our blood, once England’s got too soft to help herself, let alone us, and the Japs come down this way. They’d squash us like a soft pear.’
‘I think it’s quite likely.’
‘What?’
‘Likely.’
‘It’s pretty well a certainty. And would you blame them? If you was thirsty, wouldn’t you pick a ripe pear if it hung on nobody’s tree? Why, of course you would. And who’d blame you.’
‘Blame myself if I didn’t,’ said Somers.
‘And then their coloured labour. I tell you, this country’s too far from Europe to risk it. They’ll swallow us. As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’
‘Heaven knows.’
‘There’ll be the Labour Party, the Socialists, uniting with the workers of the world. They’ll be the workers, if ever it comes to it. Those black and yellow people’ll make ’em work — not half. It isn’t one side only that can keep slaves. Why, the fools, the coloured races don’t have any feeling for liberty. They only think you’re a fool when you give it to them, and if they got a chance, they’d drive you out to work in gangs, and fairly laugh at you. All this world’s-worker business is simply playing their game.’
‘Of course,’ said Somers. ‘What is Indian Nationalism but a strong bid for power — for tyranny. The Brahmins want their old absolute caste-power — the most absolute tyranny — back again, and the Mahommedans want their military tyranny. That’s what they are lusting for — to wield the rod again. Slavery for millions. Japan the same. And China, in part, the same. The niggers the same. The real sense of liberty only goes with white blood. And the ideal of democratic liberty is an exploded ideal. You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it out of any further democracy.’
‘There!’ said Jack. ‘That’s what I mean. We s’ll be wiped out, wiped out. And we know it. Look here, as man to man, you and me here: if you were an Australian, wouldn’t you do something if you could do something?’
‘I would.’
‘Whether you got shot or whether you didn’t! We went to France to get ourselves shot, for something that didn’t touch us very close either. Then why shouldn’t we run a bit of risk for what does touch us very close. Why, you know, with things as they are, I don’t want Victoria and me to have any children. I’d a jolly sight rather not — and I’ll watch it too.’
‘Same with me,’ yelled Somers.
Jack had come closer to him, and was now holding him by the arm.
‘What’s a man’s life for, anyhow? Is it just to save up like rotten pears on a shelf, in the hopes that one day it’ll rot into a pink canary or something of that?’
‘No,’ said Somers.
‘What we want in Australia,’ said Jack, ‘isn’t a statesman, not yet. It’s a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they find a man who’ll give the orders.’

Well, there’s the logic of the argument, Jack’s character and Somers’s enthusiastic agreement, in a nutshell.

Somers’ conflicted attitude

Jack of course had to talk about it to the people there, while Somers hung back and tried to make himself invisible, as he always did when there were strange onlookers.

For although, when he’s with him, Somers enthusiastically agrees with everything Jack says, and he is very swayed by Cooley’s talk about new forms of life, as soon as he’s alone again, Somers reverts to his core attitude of singleness, aloofness, separation.

He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood-brother. All his life he had secretly grieved over his friendlessness. And now at last, when it really offered… he didn’t want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.

This is expressed over and over, scores of times. Here he is reflecting on a meeting with Cooley, as he looks out over the ocean. I’ll give an extended quote because it exemplifies 1) Somers’ deep wish for isolated self-sufficiency but also 2) is a good example of Lawrence’s brilliant nature description, which also exemplifies 3) his habit of repetition, of beating out and varying and exploring a handful of key words in varying combinations.

These days Somers, too, was filled with fury. As for loving mankind, or having a fire of love in his heart, it was all rot. He felt almost fierily cold. He liked the sea, the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning. He went out on to the low flat rocks at low tide, skirting the deep pock-holes that were full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells and tiny, crimson anemones. Strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock-floor, all wet and sea-savage. And standing at the edge looking at the waves rather terrifying rolling at him, where he stood low and exposed, far out from the sand-banks, and as he watched the gannets gleaming white, then falling with a splash like white sky-arrows into the waves, he wished as he had never wished before that he could be cold, as sea-things are cold, and murderously fierce. To have oneself exultantly ice-cold, not one spark of this wretched warm flesh left, and to have all the terrific, icy energy of a fish. To surge with that cold exultance and passion of a sea thing! Now he understood the yearning in the seal-woman’s croon, as she went back to the sea, leaving her husband and her children of warm flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human beings. To be an isolated swift fish in the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.

These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had relapsed away from speech altogether.

He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild, fish-like rapacity. ‘Homo sum!’ All right. Who sets a limit to what a man is? Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish. (p.140)

The ‘ice-fiery, fish-burning’ sea. Wow. There’s a plot but who cares, really. One way of reading Lawrence’s novels is to regard these psycho-descriptive as oases in the deserts of dialogue and to stop and read and savour them like beautiful pictures. Take, for example, the brilliant description of Somers stripping off on the beach on a grey louring day as it starts to rain and running into the icy cold sea in the rain and exulting, then returning to the shore, showering and, full of life, making love to Harriet (pages 162 to 164). Life! To be alive! So many paragraphs you want to stop and savour.

He left off kicking himself, and went down to the shore to get away from himself. After all, he knew the endless water would soon make him forget. It had a language which spoke utterly without concern of him, and this utter unconcern gradually soothed him of himself and his world. He began to forget. (p.171)

All E.M. Forster’s novels are littered with gaseous paragraphs invoking the Greek gods which I found bloviated and irritating. I learned to skip them in order to focus on the dialogue and what happens next. The experience with Lawrence is the exact opposite: I tended to skim the badly written dialogue and didn’t much care what happened next, but found myself mesmerised by his descriptions of the sky, sunset, the bush and, most of all, the unceasing sea.

The sky was tufted with cloud, and in the afternoon veils of rain swept here and there across the sea, in a changing wind. But then it cleared again, and Somers and Harriet walked along the sands, watching the blue sky mirror purple and the white clouds mirror warm on the wet sand. The sea talked and talked all the time, in its disintegrative, elemental language. And at last it talked its way into Somers’ soul, and he forgot the world again, the babel. The simplicity came back, and with it the inward peace. (p.172)

Harriet’s attitude

Harriet, meanwhile, and probably despite Lawrence’s intentions, is a great comic character, appalled by all this nonsense, and continually pouring cold water on Somers’ pretensions. Here’s one from hundreds of examples of her down-to-earth comments on his wild opinions.

It always seems to me,’ said Somers, that somebody will have to water Australia with their blood before it’s a real man’s country. The soil, the very plants seem to be waiting for it.’
‘You’ve got a lurid imagination, my dear man,’ said Jack.
‘Yes, he has,’ said Harriet. ‘He’s always so extreme.’

And Somers knows this about himself. He knows he’s continually jumping in the deep end. When, at the start of chapter 8, he vows not to take everything so damn seriously, to lighten up and not be so judgemental, we and Harriet know it can’t last. Somers (and Lawrence) are made to over-react, sometimes into absurd beliefs and statements:

Some men have to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in the walls that shut life in! (p.184)

But sometimes into perceptions and descriptions of breath-taking vividness.

More plot

After some weeks at Torestin, Somers and Harriet move to another house, at a place some distance (a train ride) south of Sydney called Mullumbimby. The cottage is right on the coast, with a sweep of beach washed by breakers and a jetty in the distance. The house is called Coo-Ee and they love it. Lots of warm domestic details.

Here Jack and Victoria come to visit them and from here Somers makes visits to Cooley’s offices (he is a successful lawyer) back in Sydney.

Chapter 11. Willie Struthers and Kangaroo

Jack Callcott has a friend, a man named William James, a Cornishman we meet early on. His workaday nickname is Jaz. He pops up from time to time. On a memorable day up in Sydney, Jaz takes Somers to see Willie Struthers, head of the New South Wales Socialists, who delivers a great long spiel about brotherly love. Then Jaz and Somers visit the Sydney zoo, where Lovat is very taken with some of the birds. And on the evening of the same day visits Cooley, with whom he has a big argument. Even after Cooley (a big man) has clasped weedy Somers to his bosom and told him he loves him, Somers finds himself, ultimately, unable to commit to his cause. And Cooley’s resulting hatred is so powerful Somers suddenly sees him as a horror, a monster.

Chapter 12. The nightmare

This chapter is famous. It is a long, detailed, barely fictionalised account of Lawrence’s experiences stuck in England during the First World War. For the first year or so living in Hampstead, over which he and Frieda memorably saw a zeppelin in the searchlights. Later, in midwinter 1915, they moved to Cornwall, from where he was called to attend a medical examination in Bodmin, which he convincingly failed. Sickly and frail, he was a non-starter as a soldier. In Lawrence’s opinion the war destroyed a man’s ‘manly isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real’ for millions of. Even the survivors had been stripped of something, which all their wives and sweethearts noticed when they returned.

It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915-1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.

Many details but in amid them all, a mockery of the accusation thrown at him in Cornwall, that he was a German spy.

One of the most intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for his country – even if it were often a passion of hatred.

The chapter is surprisingly long at 53 pages, an eighth of the entire novel, more like a massive chunk of barely disguised and hugely aggrieved autobiography shoehorned into a novel about something completely different. And also, it is uncharacteristically lucid. Although lightly impressionistic in style, it makes more sense than most of the rest of the book, the little bits of dialogue with local police or soldiers or Harriet far more focused and to-the-point than the long, rambling, unfocused fictional dialogues with Jack Callcott or Ben Cooley.

Its realism, its earnestness, its seriousness, highlight the diffuseness and frequent absurdity of much of the rest of the book. there is some wonderful nature description, especially of the pagan landscape of Cornwall.

It was January, and there was a thin film of half-melted snow, like silver, on the fields and the path. A white, static, arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realise men worshipping stones. It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might. And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea. (p.250)

And in Cornwall he spends a halcyon summer becoming friendly with a local farming family, helping them bring in the hay. Descriptions of building haystacks and lying around on them looking at the sky while he waits for the cart to return instantly reminded me of the novella ‘Love Among The Haystacks’.

But the police call round, they learn that locals are informing on them as spies, they realise that people are actually lying behind the garden walls listening to their conversations, the house is ransacked while they’re out, then legally searched by a soldier with a warrant and a troupe of local goons. Finally they are compelled by the authorities to leave Cornwall with just three days notice and no reason given, reducing Harriet to tears. They take refuge with friends in London and then another friend lets them a cottage near Oxford.

He is called for three different physical inspections. The final one is in Derby and the abusive, aggressive attitude of the military officials and doctors making the men strip naked and wait in humiliation, cupping their balls and making them cough, making them bend over so as to inspect their anus (for chancres, sores and signs of disease) reduces Lawrence to a seething rage.

The upshot of the Derby trip is it snaps his attachment to the Midlands, to his home territory, for good. He realises he much prefers the soft countryside of Oxford, and certainly the granite pagan landscape of Cornwall. But the real impact is bigger: he comes to hate England. He, a devout Englishman, a poet of England’s countryside, in verse and prose, comes to fear and hate ‘the base and malignant power of the mob-like authorities’. He is disgusted by the tone of shrieking patriotism he associates with the new Lloyd George government which came in in December 1916, epitomised by Horatio Bottomley’s jingoistic magazine John Bull.

So: Lawrence’s disgust at the vulgar jingoism of the media, his feeling for the millions of men whose independent spirit was crushed, and his own outrageous experiences of persecution, arbitrary search and expulsion, and the physically humiliating experiences of three strip searches, all combined to make him hate England, so different from the gentle bucolic England of Shakespeare and Hardy he grew up with. Now he couldn’t wait to get away.

Why, the fictional character Somers asks himself, does all this come flooding back to him in nauseating detail in Australia, on the other side of the world? Why not during his sojourns in Italy or Sicily, or on the ship across the Indian Ocean? Maybe it’s because the Australians are English speaking and of English descent, hearing and speaking English has triggered his traumatic memories. Also, maybe it’s because Australia has the same Anglo-Saxon form of ‘democracy’ which, in England, for all the reasons given, he now associates with crude and terrifying mob rule, baying snarling jingoism?

Antisemitism

I’ve made a point of calling out the casual antisemitism in all Lawrence’s novels. Here It’s important to put it in a broader context and understand that Lawrence, like everyone of his day, was given to making sweeping generalisations about all races – this book also contains insensitive generalisations about Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Africans. And people of the day made sweeping generalisations about the ‘races’ of Europe, stereotyping Italians, Germans and French, for example. And within England, Lawrence distinguishes between the Anglo-Saxon English and the Celts of Cornwall etc. So his writings and to a large extent his thinking about life as a whole, is based on a kind of methodology which confidently generalises about all races, nations, peoples and ethnicities. And Lawrence/Somers goes out of his way to emphasise not only that Cooley is Jewish but that he is gentle, kind, loving and loveable etc etc.

BUT in the mental recoil from the hurt and humiliation recorded in the long nightmare chapter there is one passage which leaps out at the reader.

Somers knew nothing about Lloyd George. A little Welsh lawyer, not an Englishman at all. He had no real significance in Richard Lovat’s soul. Only, Somers gradually came to believe that all Jews, and all Celts, even whilst they espoused the cause of England, subtly lived to bring about the last humiliation of the great old England. They could never do so if England would not be humiliated. But with an England fairly offering herself to ignominy, where was the help? Let the Celts work out their subtlety. If England wanted to be betrayed, in the deeper issues. Perhaps Jesus wanted to be betrayed. He did. He chose Judas. (p.251)

As you can see, even in this passage ‘the Celts’ are indicted more than the Jews. Still, it was the Jews who were the smaller and more vulnerable group as the history of the 1920s and 1930s was to show. I think the passage is more about indicting Lloyd George, widely judged to have initiated a step change in Britain’s war effort but who Lawrence associated with the new tone of hysterical war-mongering and paranoid jingoism from which he was to suffer so personally. In this respect the blaming of ‘the Celts’ has a glimmer of truth: Lloyd George was a Celt and oversaw what Lawrence saw as the breaking of the old English culture.

What doesn’t have any justification at all is blaming ‘all Jews’. This is a kind of mental giving-in to the kind of thinking which blames enormous sweeping historical changes on one particular group (in our time the same xenophobic small-mindedness blames immigrants, Muslims, refugees etc for social changes which have, in fact been supervised by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron et al, the whitest of white men). Unable to cope with the sheer scale and complexity of changes in an enormous society, the temptation is to give up the attempt and just blame X, where X stands for an easily identifiable and blameable social group, almost always numerically small and vulnerable.

It’s only one throwaway sentence in an enormous, verbose, 400-page novel, and a novel which deliberately makes its most charismatic and appealing character (Cooley) Jewish. Nonetheless it is a tiny fracture, a crack, which indicates the massive fault-line which lies beneath Lawrence’s entire position. He is emphatically not a thinker about anything: he is a feeler, a tremendously sensitive perceiver of people and places, hyper-sensitive to moods and atmospheres, extraordinarily expressive and over-articulate, but whose solid, isolatable opinions are often gibberish.

Like the flaw in an otherwise perfect diamond, Lawrence’s knee-jerk antisemitism, if you choose to notice or dwell on it, undermines otherwise magnificent works of art.

Chapter 13. ‘Revenge!’ Timotheus Cries

So chapter 13 commences with Somers back in Coo-ee cottage, puzzling over why his unconscious has chosen now to dredge up all his wartime humiliations in their full horror. Maybe the sound of English voices. Maybe the discussions about a very English form of democracy, with all the susceptibility to crude demagoguery that implies. Or maybe the inversion of the rhythm of the seasons, winter when it should be summer, the familiar constellations upside down, has jangled his nerves.

‘Aaron’s Rod’ referred repeatedly to the external changes the war made, to England where it starts and then to Italy where it continues. This book, this very long passage, makes explicit the personal, psychological impact.

He was full of a lava fire of rage and hate, at the bottom of his soul. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt desecrated. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt sold. And he knew most men felt the same. (p.290)

This is a new chapter but it’s as if writing the Nightmare chapter has snapped something in Lawrence. He can’t shut up about it. It transforms the tone of the novel. Previously it had been about events; now it turns into an extended essay, Lawrence in essay mode pontificating about human nature, and feelings and the deep rage within himself which he attributes to everyone else broken by the war, and which he broadens out into an attack on all worn-out creeds and ideas. Ideas and religions have a natural lifespan, grow, flower then fade and die. And using this impressionistic logic, Somers now dismisses both Cooley-Kangaroo and Struthers as labouring at a creed, the creed of humanistic love and equality, which has in fact had its day, is dead. All that lies behind both of them is the image of the vengeful mob, the thing that terrifies Lawrence most.

And so he repeats again and again the central theme of the novel, which is his desperate wish to be free, to free himself of wretched clinging humanity, to stand aloof.

That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No—no. Kangaroo had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark. Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get his own soul clear. (p.294)

The chapter rises to a climax of swirling rhetorical declarations, explaining how Life makes no absolute statements, everything is a flux, but one must dig deep below the surface, and deep below a Christianity which has become mechanical, fossilised, and seek out the dark gods at the core of man’s being. Lots of sentences like that.

Chapter 14. Bits

After 50 pages of war reminiscence followed by 20 pages of increasingly delirious speculation about the human soul, the novel lands back on earth and we return to The Plot.

Next morning he wakes up in Sydney and reads the Bulletin, which has a section of entertaining trivia or ‘bits’. This bombardment of everyday silliness makes him see everything he’s just written about seem like pompous nonsense.

He could have kicked himself for wanting to help mankind, join in revolutions or reforms or any of that stuff. And he kicked himself still harder thinking of his frantic struggles with the ‘soul’ and the ‘dark god’ and the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer’. Blarney — blarney — blarney! He was a preacher and a blatherer, and he hated himself for it. Damn the ‘soul’, damn the ‘dark god’, damn the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer’, and above all, damn his own interfering, nosy self. (p.300)

That’s Lawrence for you. Ever-changing, never stationary, intensely experiencing one moment, one emotion, one set of thoughts and the next moment… dismissing it all as blather, moving onto the next thing, sights, scenes, people, arguments. As his wife Harriet continually tells him, he can’t stop jumping from one extreme to another. Later, in the same vein:

‘I am a fool,’ said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of it, namely, himself. (p.308)

Anyway, puncturing all this blather, Somers takes Harriet along the coast to a half-built settlement named Wolloona which they stroll around, go to the sea and pick shells till they are caught in small waves, Somers’ hat blows off into the sea and he wades in to retrieve it while Harriet collapses on the sand in hysterical laughter. It is a wonderful couple of pages, not only describing the scene with godlike powers but capturing the profoundly same wavelength these two dissimilar people operated on. It’s a wonderful record of life and living!

Breaking the fourth wall

In fact this passage breaks the fourth wall, so to speak, and the author observes that the novel, this novel anyway, amounts to a a record of the author’s musings and preachings.

I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment-pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.

And, having broken the wall once, Lawrence keeps on doing it, spilling into the next chapter which he begins in a thoroughly post-modern way, suddenly stepping back from his narrative and saying, yeah there’s all these characters yadda yadda yadda, doing stuff and there’s chapters, because a novel needs them, and if you don’t like the book chum, don’t read it.

Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a thought-adventurer, and his falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and his shipwrecks on the rocks of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most things… To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians… We can’t be at a stretch of tension all the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it. (p.312)

Chapter 15. Jack Slaps Back

As to the plot, dear me the plot, if you’re still interested in such a thing after 90 or more pages of autobiography and preaching, well, Lawrence fumbles his way back to it, although it now feels completely different, almost irrelevant compared with the power of the autobiography and then the autobiographical ideas streaming from it.

Jack calls round and is deeply unpleasant. He’s heard that Somers and Cooley had a big argument, that Somers turned down the offer of joining the movement and was shown the door. With polite smiles he threatens Somers not to tell anyone about their plans. Somers replies that he’s planning to leave Australia now, in 6 weeks maybe, but Jack snarling says, only if they let him. Somers feels as threatened and bullied as he did in wartime England, the visit triggers that anger, resentment and humiliation.

Harriet arrives back at the veranda wondering what the two men have been arguing about. They part in angry silence.

Chapter 16. A Row in Town

This book feels like it’s really abandoning any pretence to be a novel. The first 11 pages of this chapter are a preposterous farrago of scientifically illiterate pontificating about the nature of ‘the mob’, starting with an attack on the human sciences and talk about the dark god knocking on the door of our souls before going on to develop the idea of telepathy, giving an ‘explanation’ based on the made-up notion of ‘vertebral-telegraphy’ whose power Lawrence then goes on to describe in ants, fish, reptiles, birds and sperm whales.

The narrative justifies this hogwash by coalescing to become a sort of backdrop to or explanation of Richard’s ‘thoughts’:

What Richard wanted was some sort of a new show: a new recognition of the life-mystery, a departure from the dreariness of money-making, money-having, and money-spending. It meant a new recognition of difference, of highness and of lowness, of one man meet for service and another man clean with glory, having majesty in himself, the innate majesty of the purest individual, not the strongest instrument, like Napoleon. Not the tuppenny trick-majesty of Kaisers. But the true majesty of the single soul which has all its own weaknesses, but its strength in spite of them, its own lovableness, as well as its might and dread. The single soul that stands naked between the dark God and the dark-blooded masses of men. (p.334)

And, finally, eventually, we descend back down to earth and the plot gets going again. There have been political developments. The Conservative Party is fighting back against Labour, passing laws to allow non-union labour to break strikes, protecting scab workers, and making union leaders responsible for any violence that breaks out.

Richard reads that the Labour Party will be holding meetings at its base, Canberra Hall in Sydney, and so catches a train up on the day of the meetings, a small discussion one in the morning, a big mass meeting in the evening.

In the evening Somers watches a long speech about class, demanding equality between the classes and ridiculing the ‘upper’ classes, from Willie Struthers. He demands the creation of a Soviet with a maximum daily pay for anyone, including millionaires, of one pound, and screw the ridiculous Empire with ‘its out-of-date Lords and its fat-arsed, hypocritical upper classes’. The speech, unfortunately, contains familiar antisemitic tropes about Hebrew financiers being among the exploiting class that must be overthrown, as well as racial terms describing Chinese, Indians and Africans which are unacceptable to us, a hundred years later.

Anyway, a cohort of diggers from Kangaroo’s movement are in the hall and they interrupt Struther’s speech with an impressive calling out of a countdown, in fact shouting slowly and in unison up to eight, and then the hall explodes into a fight, a riot. Fighting everywhere, Somers’ guide, Jaz, tries to pull him free, but not before he’s had his collar ripped and taken a nasty blow on the forehead. Outside in the streets is a huge riot with mounted police arriving, then a bang as of a bomb going off, then the lights of ambulances arriving, as Jaz pulls a dazed Somers away and down back streets to a quiet Diggers club where he lays him on a couch to recover before heading back to find out what’s going on.

Jaz returns with Jack who’s got a bloody chin but eyes are fiery from the fight. They tell him someone shot Kangaroo in the gut but was then torn to pieces by the diggers. From the club they go out into the night which is hushed and dark with mounted cops at every street corner and make their way unhindered back to Jack’s house by about 1am. Victoria calls out but he tells her to shut up. Jack pours whiskey. After a while Jaz goes to bed leaving the enemies Jack and Somers. Jack is exultant, convinced he killed at least three of Struther’s followers with an iron bar.

‘Having a woman’s something, isn’t it? But it’s a flea-bite, nothing, compared to killing your man when your blood comes up.’ (p.352)

After which Somers goes back to his house. Over the coming weeks the papers report it as a fight between Communists and Nationalists but remarkably few people are named or arrested. A couple are convicted and sentenced to prison but Jack, for example, is merely bound over, and nobody fingers the would-be assassin of Kangaroo.

Somers and Harriet go to visit him. There is a long and what I thought pointless conversation. I can’t credit that this nationalist leader, instead of a bullish Mussolini is depicted as a feeble Jewish lawyer who goes on and on about teaching the workers to love each other. It seems a completely mad, uninformed description of the authoritarian nationalist ideology. Kangaroo is obviously wounded and his room smells of faeces and infection. He clasps Somers’ hand and passionately begs him to join his crusade to bring love to the working man.

‘They have never known the full beauty of love, the working classes. They have never admitted it. Work, bread has always stood first. But we can take away that obstacle. Teach them the beauty of love between men, Richard, teach them the highest—greater love than this hath no man—teach them how to love their own mate, and you will solve the problem of work for ever. Richard, this is true, you know it is true. How beautiful it would be! How beautiful it would be!’ (p. 358)

The crux of whether Richard will join the movement is redirected to whether Richard can love Kangaroo, or whether he loves Kangaroo but doesn’t want to, or whether he wants to but can’t bring himself to. All this seems sublimely beside the point and is plain weird to have in a novel about ‘politics’. They leave the very sick Kangaroo whose last words are ‘Don’t let me die.’

Somers’ reaction to all this is more philosophising about God and love and the dark gods. He rejects both Kangaroo and Struthers’ insistence on love, strongly preferring that a man look to himself and be true to himself and his own dark god.

He believed in the God of fear, of darkness, of passion, and of silence, the God that made a man realise his own sacred aloneness…

And:

Man’s isolation was always a supreme truth and fact, not to be forsworn. And the mystery of apartness. And the greater mystery of the dark God beyond a man, the God that gives a man passion, and the dark, unexplained blood-tenderness that is deeper than love, but so much more obscure, impersonal, and the brave, silent blood-pride, knowing his own separateness, and the sword-strength of his derivation from the dark God. This dark, passionate religiousness and inward sense of an indwelling magnificence, direct flow from the unknowable God, this filled Richard’s heart first, and human love seemed such a fighting for candle-light, when the dark is so much better.

And:

he proceeded, as ever, to try to disentangle himself from the white octopus of love. Not that even now he dared quite deny love. Love is perhaps an eternal part of life. But it is only a part. And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease, a vast white strangling octopus. All things are relative, and have their sacredness in their true relation to all other things. And he felt the light of love dying out in his eyes, in his heart, in his soul, and a great, healing darkness taking its place, with a sweetness of everlasting aloneness, and a stirring of dark blood-tenderness, and a strange, soft iron of ruthlessness.

Somers goes walking by the seashore day after day until night falls which Lawrence describes with his usual wonder, and feels his soul is null, he has no soul. He has shed the world and meaning, he never wants to go back.

Harriet and he? It was time they both agreed that nothing has any meaning. Meaning is a dead letter when a man has no soul. And speech is like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like the animals, and cast off the clutter of words. Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of the past whirling and choking us, language, love, and meaning. When a man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clock-work it was. Who dares to be soulless finds the new dimension of life. (p.367)

In this null mode he is asked to visit Kangaroo again. He is on his death bed, pale and weak. Once again he clutches Somers’ hand and begs him to say ‘I love you’ and once again Somers can’t quite bring himself to. So Kangaroo shouts out ‘you’ve killed me’ which shocks Somers and brings the nurse running, and Jack. Outside, walking in the daylight, Jack tells him what a selfish bastard he is not to say those three little words and fulfil a dying man’s wish. Is it because he’s from the Old Country where everyone’s so uptight and scared? Or just because he’s a heartless bastard?

They part and Somers spends the afternoon making arrangements at the Customs House and American consulate to take ship for San Francisco. Love Kangaroo? He hates him. He hates everyone. He wants to be left alone. In the end is that what this novel was about? Not about politics at all, but one man’s rejection of not just politics, but society as a whole with all its problems and culture and religion, and striking out utterly on his own with his own sense of the dark gods and the need for complete integrity.

He goes down to the sea at night as the moon rises for one last magnificent Laurentian hymn and paean and beyond-human perception of the natural world.

Chapter 17. Adieu Australia

Kangaroo dies and has a big funeral. Somers is beyond caring. His ship sails for America in six weeks. During that time he communes with the Australian spring. Pages of wonderful description of not just the sea, but the landscape inland and the scattered settlements. He hated the half built shanty bungalows, scattered randomly over the barren land when he first arrived; but now he’s learned to see them as entirely appropriate to the emptiness and unfinishedness of the Australian landscape. In fact he’s come to love the place, as he tells Jaz who calls by for a final chat and cup of tea out on the veranda. Lawrence describes Somers having a dream of a quaint old town in Europe, all gables and cobbled streets with a big Gothic cathedral looming over everything and waking in a panic, feeling stifled and strangled! How lovely they both feel to be free of old Europe, ruined old Europe with all its terrible history, and free to to wander the virgin bush where everything is ancient and new at the same time.

In the last act of the book the tail end of a typhoon comes down the east coast, hitting Sydney and then the town the Somers are staying in, and they’re trapped inside their little house by vicious winds and whipping rain, feeling like they’re in a submarine. The storm rages for four days and, when they emerge, has completely transformed the beach, turning it from soft sand into a warzone of mud and wreckage with a new deep stream cutting across it. They are discombobulated. Turning away from this wrecked area, in their last weeks the couple take to riding a little horse and cart into the bush, exploring its big vivid flowers and eerie emptiness.

The last days come, they close up the house and pack and travel to Sydney. Victoria Callcott and Jaz’s wife come to wave them off and to act the traditional Australian farewell whereby those on the wharf hold one end of long colourful streamers, the other end held by passengers on the ship, which finally weights anchor as the streamers slowly uncurl, pull tight and then snap. And so Frieda and Lawrence, I mean Somers and Harriet, set their faces towards America.

Apparently this final chapter was written entirely in Taos, New Mexico, after he arrived there in September 1922, which might explain the sense of nostalgia, the emotion behind the writing, a traditional sense of lovely loss you in which could possibly detect something like sentimentalism.

Summary

Chaotic and nonsensical as long tracts of the novel have been, somehow, as with all Lawrence, its emotional intensity and candour and the endless vividness of its countless descriptions leave you with an impression of uncanny magnificence.

Credit

‘Kangaroo’ by D. H. Lawrence was first published in the UK by Martin Secker in 1923. Page references are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 19, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged #democracy, Anglo-Saxon, Anthony Burgess, assassination, Australia, Ben Cooley, Benjamin 'Ben' Cooley, Blue Mountains, Bodmin, Bolsheviks, Canberra Hall, Celts, Ceylon, Conservative Party, Coo-Ee, Cornwall, D.H. Lawrence, dark gods, Darlington, Derby, DH Lawrence, Diggers, Diggers' clubs, E.M. Forster, English literature, fiction, First World War, First World Warm, Frieda Lawrence, gum-trees, Hardy, Harriet Somers, Jack Callcott, Japan, Jaz, Jew, Jewish, John Bull, kangaroo, Kangaroos, Labour movement, Lenin, Lloyd-George, Love Among The Haystacks, Mabel Dodge Luhan, march on Rome, mateship, Mollie Skinner, Mullumbimby, Mussolini, Napoleon, New Mexico, New South Wales Socialists, Nightmare chapter, novel, Orestes, Perth, Politics, power, Pylades, Richard Aldington, Richard Lovat Somers, Richard Somers, RLS, Robert Louis Stevenson, San Francisco, Shakespeare, Sicily, socialists, Soviet, Struthers, Suez Canal, Sydney, Sydney Bulletin, Sydney zoo, Taos, telepathy, The Boy in the Bush, Thirroul, Timotheus, Torestin, Trewhella, vertebral-telegraphy, William James, Willie Struthers, Wolloona, xenophobia, zuccas

Posted by Simon on February 19, 2025

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‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger @ Serpentine South

When hippies go bad…

Barbara Kruger is an American artist. She was born in Newark in 1945, the same year as Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton and Pete Townsend i.e. she is 78 years old and from the generation which made their names in the later 1960s and 1970s.

At the start of her career Kruger worked as a graphic designer for American magazines, and when she branched out into fine art she brought with her a feel for the impact of combining images and words. Over the decades she’s developed a powerful visual language that borrows, adapts and expands the techniques and aesthetics of advertising and other media.

It comes as no surprise to learn that, as a white American female artist of the 60s generation, her artworks have, to quote the curators, ‘continually explored mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism and capital’ – in other words, exactly what you’d expect.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’ at Serpentine South is Kruger’s first solo show in London in over twenty years, so an opportunity for Kruger fans (and a friend of mine did describe himself to me as ‘a Kruger fan’) to catch up with her work this century.

These aren’t pictures hanging on a wall so that you stroll from one to the next, they are massive installations plastered across entire walls and, in some cases, round corners and into the next alcove or room. It feels like a total environment and one in which really important messages are being SHOUTED at you from disturbing and challenging billboards or hoardings.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

So you feel you’re being bombarded with really important messages, the only problem being that it’s quite frequently hard to make out what they are, although the general vibe is disillusioned, cynical, confrontational, an outpouring of negativity and doom. Take the text in the big room with black and white text all over the wall:

This is about loving and longing, about shaming and hating, about the promises of kindness and the pleasures of doing damage. This is about crazy desire and about having a gift for cruelty…

Already my attention is wandering but it goes on, covering the entire wall:

This is about the difference between the figure and the body, about the fickleness of renown, about who gets what and who owns what, about who is remembered and who is forgotten, here, in this place, this is about you, I mean me, I mean you.

Now, words are words and unavoidably spawn meanings and intentions, triggering our instinct for decoding and interpretation whether we want to or not. It is fairly common for modern art works to feature words, or be entirely made up of text, or even hoarding-sized presentations like this. (I immediately think of current Royal Academy exhibition which includes a set of 8 or so picture frames containing coloured paper on which are printed the names of native American tribes. That’s it, just the names, no images. Words on a coloured background.) Here in Kruger’s works the variety of layout and design is visually pleasing, up to a point – although the use of the same tone of red for all the frames and captions quickly becomes monotonous and wearing.

But the main experience of reading these words, which we are condemned by our literacy to do, is of struggling with their calculated, in-your-face negativity and either responding to them or giving up. How much of the following should you read before you realise you don’t care?

You. You are here looking through the looking glass, darkly. Seeing the unseen, the invisible, the barely there. You. Whoever you are. Wherever you are. Etched in memory, until you, the looker, is gone. Unseen. No more. You too.

The texts are not rubbish. They are obviously aspiring to a kind of poetic, not a million miles away from Samuel Beckett’s minimalist and repetitive prose. But I liked neither their style nor their content. If the message of this black-and-white piece is that you, the gallery visitor, are seeing (and taking part in) a series of choices and selections which include some artefacts (based on certain institutional and cultural values) but excludes other things (for the same reason), this is fair enough, if a bit obvious, like a lot of the other sentiments on display.

But having read hundreds of examples of prose poetry in my lifetime, I think Kruger’s stuff is on the poor side. Putting the meaning to one side, it lacks any rhythm or flow. It’s often staccato. In fact it’s remarkable how many words there are on display and how few of them are at all memorable or striking. Which is the exact opposite of advertising, where immense time and effort goes into trying to coin short phrases which will catch our distracted attention and burrow into our minds (‘Every little helps’, ‘Domino ooh hoo’).

Instead, all the texts have that dire, stricken quality of so much art text, emotionally numb phrasing conjuring up a dire sense of crisis and emergency. It’s like reading the gasped utterances of a Kafka character having a panic attack.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

That’s when it’s not being patronisingly dumb, as in the set of wall panels presumably satirising the self-righteousness of American Republicans, or maybe ‘the West’ in general, sixth-form sarcasm expressed in the big red panel reading:

Our people are better than your people. More intelligent, more powerful, more beautiful, and cleaner. We are good and you are evil. God is on our side, our shit doesn’t stink, and we invented everything.

Presumably this a satire on the imagined attitude of ideological defenders of America, for example the circle round George Bush who launched the fabulous invasion of Iraq, or maybe of Western conservatives in general. Or maybe it’s a critique of anyone of any nation or race who adopts these kinds of chauvinistic attitudes. But the triteness of its attitude undermines your faith in the level of her analysis or interpretation. Makes you realise you’re dealing with not very sophisticated stuff.

In the same vein of crushing obviousness, the three panels on the left contain the entire texts of 1) the marriage vows 2) the US pledge of allegiance and 3) the oath you take in a court of law. They are presented without any comment but, in the context of this exhibition, you can almost feel the irony and sarcasm dripping from them. It reminds me of the famous shots of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sarcastically ‘applauding’ Donald Trump after he made his State of the Union address. It has the same feel of self-undermining childishness. Because some people actually do want to get married and do mean their vows; some people actually do feel patriotic about their country. And from an aesthetic point of view, having the words slowly appear one by one, in the style of a lame PowerPoint presentation, doesn’t make them any more intelligent or interesting.

Kruger’s works are visually striking but textually weak, and most of them are made of text or heavily rely on text, so the overall effect was, for me, limp and disappointing.

‘No Comment’

The exhibition marks the UK premiere of ’Untitled (No Comment)’ (2020). This is an immersive (i.e. a room containing a) three-channel video installation. This kind of thing is pretty common nowadays: right now in London there’s a huge and stunning three-video installations in the Edward Burtynsky exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, and one by John Akomfrah (‘Vertigo Sea’) in the Royal Academy’s ‘Entangled Pasts’ exhibition.

Kruger’s piece is much more modest in scope than those two pieces (which are huge, world-encompassing depictions of a) man’s destruction of the natural environment and b) cruelty to animals, respectively). Much more narrowly, ‘No Comment’ is about the brave new digital world, conceived as exploring ‘contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online’.

It combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats. Cats. Yes, there are definitely more cats in this piece than in the Burtynsky or Akomfrah films. This piece includes a barrage of nihilistic slogans, hippy idealism turned very sour indeed, warnings about how FAKE NEWS can turn us AGAINST OURSELVES, yawn. I was standing next to three student-age young women who were recording it on the smart phones and the only bit they reacted to was when the cats started talking, which made them explode with giggles, nudge each other and try to capture it on video so as to TikTok or Instagram it. This stuff doesn’t interrogate or subvert anything, it’s just tired slogans and strained sight gags.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

The exhibition also features recent video ‘reconfigurations’ – or what the artist calls ‘replays’ – of several of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s. I think this refers to the collage-type assemblages of magazine photos all splattered with controversial slogans, and includes ‘Untitled (I shop therefore I am)’ (1987) and ‘Untitled (Your body is a battleground)’ (1989). (Personally, I find it irritating when an artist calls their work ‘untitled’ and then immediately gives it a title.)

I think the ‘updating’ of these amounts to the fact that they are no longer static artefacts but videos of these ancient works which assemble the originally static images from jigsaw pieces, each piece of the jigsaw slotting into place with an amusingly literal click. Again, like a basic PowerPoint animation.

Anyway, the titles of these pieces alone indicate Kruger’s intention to ‘subvert’, ‘interrogate’ and generally question the consumer capitalism and sexualised imagery which have shaped our culture for decades. But after forty years of challenging this consumer culture and these sexualised images, have they been erased from the face of the earth, has the good fight been won – or are they more ubiquitous and powerful than ever before? Obviously the latter so, to be a little harsh, the content and aim of most of these pieces began to feel like art school whining rather than anything which might have any impact outside a lecture hall or gallery.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

The wall labels tell us that over the past 40 years, Kruger has displayed her work in numerous types of urban settings, including on buildings, billboards, hoardings, buses, in skate parks and so on. So a feature of her work is how adaptable it is to the setting or environment. Which explains why, for this exhibition, we are not, as I said, strolling between individual pictures hung on a wall, but, at several points, ‘immersed’ in works which have been adapted to the scale and layout of the Serpentine Gallery’s rooms, very impressively designed to fit around them.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

Massive works. Clever videos. Loud audio. Images interspersed with text. The same monotonous tone of red everywhere. And the same monotonous, psychologically null, Kafka expressions of art school alienation:

You ask a question. You wait for an answer. You want to keep on breathing. You want a room with a view. You want to change your life. You try to be generous. You never lie. You fall in love.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

Suddenly I knew who all these texts remind me of – Talking Heads lyrics:

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’

The same dumb repetition, the same American suburban nervous breakdown aesthetic, the same panic attack chic. If you think Talking Heads are cutting edge (the song this lyric is from, ‘Once in a Lifetime’, dates from 1980, 44 years ago), then Kruger’s approach is for you.

Text and commentary

One room contains what looks like a ‘brief’ from an art school lecture, a text which is packed with buzzwords such as ‘globalised world’, ‘post identity’, ‘post gender’ and so on, which has been blown up and pasted onto two boards. And then Kruger has crudely circled all these buzzwords and written in notes querying and questioning them. For example:

[Sentence in the text]: ‘It’s clear that identity is back.’
[Kruger’s commentary]: When and where did it go? Its new renditions come with the added features of agency, disruption and exchangeability. In what venues, locations, events and discourses was identity missing and mistaken?

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

Three points:

1. The Biter Bit

It is a bit rich of Kruger, an American artist committed to ‘subverting’ and ‘interrogating’ ‘modes of discourse’ around ‘gender’, ‘identity’, ‘consumer capitalism’ and so on to suddenly notice the riot of sociological jargon which has overtaken and infested the humanities, and then to object to it – because this is her intellectual environment, the one created by decades of hyper-intellectualising, left-wing, feminist and post-colonial critique in the academic and art worlds, the kind of thing to which she and her work have made a notable contribution

And this runaway discourse above all stems from the United States, her United States, which pioneered this clotted, exclusionary jargon and then exported it to universities and humanities departments around the world, where it now runs rampant. Kruger herself is deeply imbrued in this jargon and the art world she operates and flourishes in is itself a global epicentre of this sociological-cum-aesthetic discourse, as a glance at the wall labels, let alone the exhibition catalogue, instantly reveals.

2. Cultural politics turn out to be stunningly counter-productive

So when it comes to mocking academic jargon, she is like a fly stuck in the flypaper of the impenetrable postmodern jargon which she and her generation helped to create. But, after decades of bubbling in the background (where I was taught it all decades ago) this kind of sociological argot is now spilling over into mainstream politics. And what’s interesting about our times is how this is creating the same toxic divisions as it has done in academia for decades, but now out in the wider world – triggering unwinnable arguments in which everyone accuses everyone else of antisemitism, Islamophobia, sexism, racism, bigotry, transphobia, xenophobia – a world, especially down in the sewer of social media, in which the campaigns in favour of wokeness, Black Lives Matter, #metoo, no matter how well-intentioned, have in practice created a whole roster of toxic touchstones by which the zealous can judge and accuse others, while the ones accused can fight back with their own forms of toxic catchphrases and slogans – calling out, wokeness, slagging off the ‘Guardian reading, tofu eating wokerati’ and so on and so on.

No matter how well-intentioned and morally right all these left-liberal campaigns may be (as well as all the environmental ones like Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion) the practical, real world impact has been to alienate huge numbers of people who feel (or are manipulated into feeling by the right-wing media) that their core values and identities are being got at, threatened, denied.

This, in the cultural sphere (along with stagnant economies and ecosystems coming under stress in the economic and environmental spheres) helps to explain the rise of nationalistic right-wing populism around the world. Technology is changing fast, the planet is fucked, and everywhere pressure groups are attacking the conservative staples of the religion, family and racial identity. Hence, in Kruger’s US of A, 50 years of feminism, anti-racism and university Marxism are more than likely going to result later this year in…the return of President Trump.

It seems like the more hyper-complex and impenetrable the radical academic jargon becomes, and the more it spreads throughout all the humanities and then leaks out into the real world, the more the very forces it sets out to question and undermine (capitalism, consumerism, environmental destruction, inequality, racism and sexism and homophobia) triumph, going from strength to strength, as if there is some deep, voodoo social law at work, some law of paradoxes so that the more feminists write about the male gaze (and the more you read the phrase on caption after caption at exhibition after exhibition), the more sexist and objectifying the media become; the more post-colonial studies books pour from the presses, the more openly racist leading politicians become.

I can’t be the only one feeling we’re living through a kind of death vortex of ever-accelerating abuse and anger, claim and counter-claim, outrage and cancelling, naming and shaming, whose clamour drowns out all moderate conversations.

‘Your body is a battlefield’ by Barbara Kruger. Photo by the author

3. It’s a generational thing

As I pointed out at the start, Kruger was born in 1945 and began her career in the late 1960s. This makes her a second wave feminist:

My daughter is a Sociology student and fourth wave feminist, extremely sensitised to the third wave issues of race and intersectionality, and in addition a fourth wave child of the internet and social media. She calls Woman’s Hour white feminism, a term she cheerfully interchanges with ‘BBC feminism’ – nice, clean, middle-class, private school-educated and white feminism. Emma Barnett.

Having had so many conversations with her on the subject(s), having helped her revise for her Sociology A-level and proofread her essays for her Sociology degree, I now see many issues, articles, movies, books and art works through her eyes. Above all, I recognise how completely different the worldview and assumptions of people under 25 are from those of me and my generation, even the supposed ‘radicals’ or ‘left wingers’ of my generation. We have been left waaaaaay behind by cultural and sociological assumptions which have moved on, light years on, sometimes – in the every day, every minute, every second use of social media and how that affects communication and perception and people’s sense of themselves and of the world they’re moving through with their smartphones set permanently to ALERT – beyond anything I can really understand or take in.

All I really know is that the assumptions, beliefs and worldviews of my 20-something daughter (and my son, too) are radically different from mine, far more switched on, plugged in and attuned to the subtleties and complexities of issues around race and gender in polyglot multicultural societies than my clodhopping old ’70s leftism ever dreamed of.

I’m sharing all this because it explains why, as I moved through this exhibition of Barbara Kruger, I felt like I was listening to the sound of a white, second-wave, American feminist tutting and disapproving of a world, and of a discourse, which have moved on and left her far behind, as it’s left most of us behind.

Reading Kruger’s cranky comments on these huge billboards (what else are we intended to do?) was not only:

1) Tedious – too much like my day job of proofreading government documents where I spend a good deal of time reading the impenetrable original text and then breaking my head trying to understand the cryptic, sometimes bad-tempered comments scrawled over them.

2) Amusing – but not in the way she intended it to be. It felt like listening to my Dad complaining about how football is nowadays all about Saudi money and American owners and nothing like the simple, honest sport it used to be in his day. Or listening to Rod Stewart complain that modern music’s all made by kids with laptops in their bedrooms, instead of honest bands performing in front of live audiences in their local clubs, like back in the good old days.

‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You’ felt, in other words, like the voice of the old generation railing against the new-fangled jargon and technology of the young – the take-home message of the annotated comments artwork I described above could be summarised as ‘Things were so much simpler and more honest in my day’.

Kruger’s installations complaining about tired old subjects like the perils of consumer capitalism (‘I shop therefore I am’) read like tattered old banners from the Miners’ Strike or posters from CND marches – relics from a bygone era, beautifully presented, stylishly designed, and completely out of date.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by the author

The merch

It goes without saying that after you’ve been bombarded with slogans and messages telling you to Stop Consumer Capitalism Now, Our Earth Is Not A Trash Can, I Shop Therefore I am etc, you emerge from the exhibition into the, er, gallery shop. Here you can buy loads of Barbara Kruger merchandise, such as anti-consumerist tote bags, posters, postcards, t-shirts and the expensive glossy catalogue. There! That’s your ‘continually explored mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism and capital’ all wrapped up in a tidy box and good to go. Have a nice day, sir.

Night falls

Dusk falls over Serpentine South gallery, highlighting one of Kruger’s text-heavy works.

Installation view of ‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger at Serpentine South. Photo by George Darrell

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by Simon on March 13, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Politics

Posted by Simon on March 13, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/thinking-of-you-i-mean-me-i-mean-you-barbara-kruger-serpentine-south/

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art @ the Barbican

Big and beautiful

This is a great exhibition, a huge and dazzling collection of contemporary fabric art from around the world, works large and small, incorporating a wide variety of techniques, bringing together images and traditions and colour palettes, stories and ideas from around the world.

Blood in the Grass, 1966 by Hannah Ryggen © Hannah Ryggen / DACS 2023. Photo by Kode / Dag Fosse

It brings together just over 100 artworks by 50 international practitioners. These include well-known names such as Faith Ringgold, Tracey Emin, Cecilia Vicuña, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Yinka Shonibare, alongside many less well-known figures. And it covers a very wide range of media, from intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.

Textile as a medium

Textiles play an extraordinarily wide variety of roles in our everyday lives. They cover and protect us, engage our senses, trigger our memories, indicate our gender, display our beliefs. We are wrapped in cloth when we’re born and shrouded in it when we die and every day in between will be wearing some kind of fabric. I just towelled myself down after a shower, then slipped on some comfortable fleece trousers and a t-shirt, am sitting on a cotton-cushioned chair, later tonight will slip between a white cotton sheet and a patterned duvet cover. Fabrics are everywhere in our lives.

Exhibition aims

But Barbican exhibitions are never just about beautiful objects, they are always polemical and political, they’re always making a point. This one has two aims:

1) One is to challenge and question the way artistic work in fabrics has always played second fiddle to the fine arts i.e. painting and traditional sculpture, always been looked down on, often demeaningly referred to as ‘women’s work’, or slighted for having such close association with domestic and artisan production.

2) The second aim is very strongly political: every one of the artists has been chosen for the way they use textiles, fibre and thread with political goals – to challenge oppressive power structures, to commemorate the victims of state power and historical wrongs, to stand up for the weak and oppressed, to act as rallying cries or symbols of resistance to power.

The exhibition aims:

to shine a light on artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles, harnessing the medium to ask charged questions about power: who holds it, and how can it be challenged and reclaimed?

to communicate vital ideas about power, resistance and survival.

And:

From intimate hand-crafted pieces to monumental sculptural installations, the works [gathered here] offer narratives of violence, imperialism and exclusion alongside stories of resilience, love and hope.

‘Hard-luck stories’

What this means in practise is that a lot of the works on display, no matter how beautiful or appealing at first glance, turn out to have harrowing and shocking inspirations or subject matter. For some reason I’ve been listening to the old Bob Dylan song, Black Diamond Bay. In the last verse the narrator cynically laments that:

Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear.

Well, that perfectly describes the exhibits here. All of them have darker sides, and you need quite a strong stomach to cope with some of the stories you read about.

For example, the very first room contains a big bold quilt by Tracey Emin. This recalls her famous quilted tent, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995’, and I immediately liked it because of the punk associations of the Union Jack. It also made me think of my daughter, a classic ‘school refuser’ who might well have said, with the artist, ‘No you listen – I’m not late – you’re lucky!’ All of which made me smile.

But then I read the wall label and discovered that this hand-stitched appliqué blanket expresses Emin’s feelings as a 13-year-old girl in 1977, the year a man raped her. Ah. Oh. Not so funny or entertaining now, is it? Now you understand the way the work’s sweary, confrontational text, cut out in felt and hand-stitched onto fabric, really comes from a place of great hurt and anger and vulnerability. God. Upsetting.

In a similar vein, I turned a corner into one of the upper gallery’s 12 alcoves and was immediately struck and attracted by the rich deep scarlet colouring of this wonderful piece of fabric, made all the more vibrant by the way it’s set against the jet-black background.

Installation view of ‘Luingamla Kashan’ by Zamthingla Ruivah (1990 to the present). Photo by the author

Until I read the wall label:

In 1986 a young woman in Northern India named Luingamla, a friend of the artist, was murdered by army officers who attempted to rape her. The officers walked free due to a law, a remnant of British colonial rule, that meant that armed forces were immune from being tried in civil courts. Student groups and the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s Association) rallied to bring a case before the courts. They won the case in 1990, four years after her murder. Ruivah wove this keshan — a woollen sarong worn by men and women in the Naga Hills of Manipur, northeast India — to commemorate Luingamla’s path to justice. Since then, the design has been passed down through Naga communities across the region, with more than 6,000 women having produced over 15,000 of them. They have become a symbol of solidarity with the Naga resistance movement and the fight against state violence towards women.

Probably ‘hard luck story’ isn’t the correct term, but see what I mean? Every single artifact here has an upsetting or problematic inspiration or purpose.

Take the image I opened this review with, ‘Blood in the Grass’ by Hannah Ryggen. This turns out, on investigation, to be a visual depiction of the US war in Vietnam. Once you read the wall label you learn that the face at the top right is a stylised portrait of US President Lyndon B. Johnson, who presided over the disastrous escalation of the war in the late 1960s. And that the green rectangles represent the lush fields of Vietnam while the grid of red lines represents the blood shed by the massacred Vietnamese. Ah.

Or take this massive, wall-sized piece by Tau Lewis, ‘‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ which, at first sight, looks like lots of sea creatures frolicking against a patchwork of blue fabrics representing the ocean, a fairly harmless work you might find hanging in a sixth-form art block.

‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ by Tau Lewis (2019) © Tau Lewis, courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

But in fact:

This patchwork quilt in part pays homage to the enslaved women and children who lost their lives during the Middle Passage (the enforced transport of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). Reimagining them as sea creatures, Lewis transforms the trauma that lies in underwater territories into spaces of regeneration and emancipation.

There’s a lot about the historical crime of the slave trade, which feeds through into more up-to-date crimes against Black people and invocations of the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘american Juju for the Tapestry of Truth’ by Teresa Margolles (2015) Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich/ Paris

Apparently, artist Teresa Margolles often uses material residues from murder sites in her art. This patchwork tapestry was laid on the ground at the site in New York where Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man, was placed in an illegal chokehold and killed by New York police.

It’s one of a pair of works by Margolles which are laid flat on lightboxes like the bodies of the murdered placed on autopsy tables. The works were made collaboratively with embroiderers who were close to the victims. Members of the Harlem Needle Arts cultural arts institute made the work commemorating Garner’s death, a patchwork which also honours other African American victims of police brutality.

So, to recap: this is very far indeed from being a collection of pretty textiles. Every work tells a story and many of the stories are harrowing and upsetting.

Favourites

Here are some of the works I liked most, based more on their actual appearance and the impact they made on me than the righteousness of the issues they address. I add the curators’ explanations in italics.

‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018)

Installation view of ‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018) Photo by the author

In TIKAR/MEJA, images of tables are woven into the mats through the weft and warp of colourful strips of pandan leaves, using the same techniques Yee’s ancestors used for centuries. The table serves as a symbol for the imposition of a patriarchal and colonial worldview onto a population, while the mat signifies a more democratic and mutual power, imbued with ancestral knowledge and traditions. This display shows twelve works from a series of sixty that can be displayed in different configurations.

‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019)

Installation view of ‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019) Photo by the author

‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.’ This passage from the Bible inspired the title of Zapata’s first sprawling ‘shag’ sculpture. Its structure references the architecture of the Nazca ceremonial site Cahuachi, where a huge woven cloth was excavated in 1952. She transforms the ruin into a landscape of vibrant latch-hooked threads, refusing any risk that this ancestral site might be lost to time. The undulating form subverts the notion of the rug as floor-based: Indigenous communities in Peru only began using textiles on the floor after the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

Incidentally, the Zapata work raised a basic question about the exhibition which is that I really, really wanted to reach out, touch, stroke and run my hands over lots and lots of the works here. The curators make it worse by repeatedly emphasising how warm and intimate and comforting so many different types of fabric are – only to place around every single one of them, loud alarms which are triggered if you step or even put your hand beyond the black bars on the floor. Frustrating.

As usual the show is spread over the Barbican’s two floors. The 12 or so upstairs rooms have some great pieces, but the most impressive space is the big room downstairs, which contains the Zapata piece, a typical Abakan by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose major retrospective at Tate Modern I reviewed not so long ago.

Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012)

It also contains maybe the single most striking work in the show, a forest of slender, brightly coloured fabrics suspended from the ceiling and billowing gently as people walked past them, created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña.

Installation view of ‘Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012) photo by the author

The idea of hanging fabrics is familiar to anyone who caught Vicuña’s recent installation at Tate Modern. According to the curators:

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom. This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues found in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings.

Igshaan Adams

Mind you, the upstairs has a very impressive room, probably the best single space, filled with works by Igshaan Adams. It’s an installation consisting of several works. From the ceiling hang ‘prayer clouds’ gassy feeling conglomerate structures made from gold and silver link chain, copper , gold and silver wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint. Quite a mix!

Installation view of the Igshaan Adams room. Photo by the author

Through the ‘foggy’ effect of these metal imbroglios you see a more conventional rectangular work hanging on the wall. This is ‘Heideveld’ (2021) made of wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine. It was worth going right up close to the surface of this to see the extraordinary range of material which have been used and the awesome amount of work it must have taken.

Close-up view of ‘Heideveld’ by Igshaan Adams (2021) Photo by the author

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so-called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually.’

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993)

Although the works the curators have chosen all too often commemorate murder, oppression, racism, sexism, misogyny and so on, there are occasional moments of happiness, like the sun breaking through the clouds on a gloomy winter’s day. One such piece is ‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks.

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993) © Sheila Hicks, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023, courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

In ‘Family Treasures’, Hicks draws upon the intimacy of textile: we all wear it, we invest it with feelings and it is literally the texture of our everyday lives. While in Amsterdam in 1993, she asked close friends and family members to surrender their most beloved items of clothing, which she wrapped in colourful yarn and thread. Each tightly-wound bundle is a reminder of what we hold dear.

Hicks is a leading member of the fibre arts movement in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 70s, in which mostly women artists experimented with fibre and thread as a legitimate medium for art. Hicks’ work is often sculptural, playful and harnesses a variety of scales — from the small and intimate to the monumental — challenging the idea that textiles are flat, decorative and wall-based. Her work has been motivated by the acknowledgement that fibre permeates peoples’ lives. She has commented: ‘you can’t go anywhere in the world without touching fibre.’

Sweet idea, huh? And very valid point that fabric art needn’t be flat and wall-based, as many, many of the works here amply demonstrate.

Hammock by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003)

‘Hammock’ (part of ‘Four Hammocks’) by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003) Courtesy of Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington DC. Photo by Chi Lam

‘Hammock’ was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.

Conclusion

I’ve covered 11 of the 50 exhibitors. That leaves 39 more for you to discover in this big, colourful, wonderful but – be warned – sometimes upsetting and challenging show. If it sets out to prove that work in fabric can be every bit as interesting as more traditional ‘fine art’, then it triumphantly succeeds. And if it wishes to show that this kind of work also lends itself to collaborative, community-based responses to brutality, abuse of power and exploitation, then it also succeeds.

Lastly, I haven’t devoted enough time to considering the actual techniques of quilting, sewing, knitting, collaging and assembling which are on display throughout the show. That’s because I’m not really qualified to do so, but the friend I went with hardly read any of the labels (thus sparing herself quite a lot of distress) and instead was riveted by the variety and inventiveness of technical skills on display.

I haven’t really dwelt enough on the artistry, skill and inventiveness which has gone into so many of these pieces. It’s worth visiting for anyone interested in fabric, quilting, sewing, decorating and texture-based art for that reason alone. Quite apart from the loud blare of the political stories and issues, here is a collection of quietly fastidious and intricate artistry.

Detail from ‘Dylegued (Entierro)’ by Teresa Margolles (2013) Photo by the author

Participating artists

Pacita Abad (The Philippines/USA)
Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland)
Igshaan Adams (South Africa)
Ghada Amer (Egypt/France)
Arpilleristas (Chile)
Mercedes Azpilicueta (Argentina)
Yto Barrada (Morocco)
Kevin Beasley (USA)
Sanford Biggers (USA)
Louise Bourgeois (France / USA)
Diedrick Brackens (USA)
Jagoda Buić (Croatia)
Margarita Cabrera (Mexico / USA)
Feliciano Centurión (Paraguay)
Judy Chicago (USA)
Myrlande Constant (Haiti)
Cian Dayrit (The Philippines)
Tracey Emin (UK)
Jeffrey Gibson (USA)
Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic (The Netherlands / Panama and The Netherlands / Yugoslavia)
Harmony Hammond (USA)
Sheila Hicks (USA)
Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa)
Yee I-Lann (Malaysia)
Kimsooja (South Korea)
Acaye Kerunen (Uganda)
José Leonilson (Brazil)
Tau Lewis (Canada)
Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana)
Teresa Margolles (Mexico)
Georgina Maxim (Zimbabwe)
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (Poland)
Mrinalini Mukherjee (India)
Violeta Parra (Chile)
Solange Pessoa (Brazil)
Loretta Pettway (Gee’s Bend) (USA)
Antonio Pichillá (Guatemala)
Faith Ringgold (USA)
LJ Roberts (USA)
Zamthingla Ruivah (India)
Hannah Ryggen (Norway)
Tschabalala Self (USA)
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (UK)
Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon)
Angela Su (Hong Kong)
Lenore Tawney (USA)
T. Vinoja (Sri Lanka)
Cecilia Vicuña (Chile)
Billie Zangewa (Malawi / South Africa)
Sarah Zapata (Peru / USA)

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by Simon on February 18, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture

Posted by Simon on February 18, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/18/unravel-the-power-and-politics-of-textiles-in-art-the-barbican/

Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)

‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)

This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.

Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.

I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:

Tiro’s memoirs

As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:

I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)

A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.

Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).

Sources

Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.

Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:

Part one: Exile (58 to 47 BC)

‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.

The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.

They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.

Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).

Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.

But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).

Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)

Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).

Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).

Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).

Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.

Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.

Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).

Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).

But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).

Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)

The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.

Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).

Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.

First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).

And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.

Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).

He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).

Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.

After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.

And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.

Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.

But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).

Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).

(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).

Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):

politics is the most noble of callings
there is no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men
no individual or combination of individuals should be allowed to become too powerful
politics is a profession not a pastime for dilettantes
a statesman should devote his life to studying the science of politics in order to acquire all the knowledge that is necessary
that authority in a state must always be divided
that of the three known forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and people – the optimum is a combination of all three, since kings can be capricious, an aristocracy self-interested, and an uncontrolled multitude is a mob

Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission

Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators

detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)

Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).

En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).

In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.

Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.

Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.

So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.

Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.

Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.

Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.

Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.

It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).

The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.

And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:

out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)

In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).

Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.

Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.

Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).

Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).

In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.

Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.

It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.

‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)

The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).

Part two: Redux (47 to 43 BC)

They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).

He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.

Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).

Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).

Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.

Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).

His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).

Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:

On the fear of death
On the endurance of pain
On the alleviation of distress
On the remaining disorders of the soul
On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:

to desire nothing too much
to be content with what you have
to be entirely self sufficient within yourself so that whatever you lose, you can carry on regardless
to do no harm
to realise it is better to suffer an injury than inflict one
to acknowledge that life is a loan from nature which must be paid back at any time

‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).

Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.

Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.

Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.

Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).

Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).

Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).

Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.

On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.

Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.

Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:

A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)

Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)

So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).

The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).

Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.

Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.

One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.

An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.

Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).

Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.

Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.

He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).

Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).

It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).

Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).

It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.

Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).

Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).

Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.

BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).

But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.

A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.

The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.

It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.

Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)

In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.

When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:

That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)

And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.

Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.

At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).

Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).

Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).

Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.

A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:

the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)

So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.

At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).

Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.

It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.

They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).

They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.

Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.

They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.

They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.

The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).

Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.

They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).

Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.

All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.

My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)

The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.

It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.

And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.

Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.

Key themes

Politics

As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.

There is always this to be said of politics: it is never static. (p.51)
‘Nothing in politics can be planned in advance for seven years.’ (p.137)
It is the most important rule in politics always to keep things moving. (p.433)

But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.

Power

I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.

And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.

It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.

With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).

And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.

It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.

Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.

The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.

The law

A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.

Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.

Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.

So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:

‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)

War atrocities

As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:

Dyrrachium is still recovering from the fate ordained by the Senate in the 150s, namely razed to the ground and its entire population of 150,000 sold into slavery
Harris makes room for a scene in which Tiro reads through Caesar’s Commentaries on his Gallic Wars and works out that by Caesar’s own account, he has been responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 Gauls and Germans in just one campaigning season (p.45)
Metellus Nepos reads out a despatch from Caesar to the senate in which the great man admits that of the 65,000 strong army of the Nervii only 500 were left alive (p.70)
Caesar’s lieutenant wins a great naval battle against the Celts, has their leaders executed and their entire nation sold into slavery. (p.147)
Caesar lures 430,000 members of the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes across the Rhine and then annihilates them. (p.148)

It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.

Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.

Family ties

The stern republican Brutus was the nephew of the stern moralist Marcus Portius Cato (140).
Julius Caesar married off his daughter Julia to Pompey.
Mark Antony was the stepson of Publius Lentulus Sura, one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death. One among many sources of enmity between the two men.
Cassius Longinus was married to Brutus’s sister.
Domitius Ahenobarbus was married to Cato’s sister.
The consul Marcus Philippus was married to Caesar’s niece (142).
Octavian was Caesar’s great-nephew.

Dated diction

In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.

I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.

Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.

It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.

‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).

On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?

Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.

When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:

‘What an utter villain that fellow is.’ (Cicero about Crassus, p.154)
‘The man’s ingratitude is unbelievable!’ (Milo on Pompey, p.178)
‘I am delighted to meet you! My wife has always talked of you most fondly.’ (Dolabella to Tiro, p.296)

Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.

I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)

Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.

Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.

The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.

But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.

Scraps

Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).

Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).

Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).

Credit

Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. Page references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

My Cicero reviews

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My ancient Rome reviews

Robert Harris reviews

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by Simon on July 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Politics, Thriller

Tagged Africa, Agathe Licinia, Alexander the Great, ancient Rome, Antium, Apuleius Saturninus, Aristatus, Asicius, assassination of Caesar, Astura, Atticus, Aulus Hirtius, Baiae, Battle of Carrhae, Battle of Mutena, battle of Pharsalus, Bay of Naples, Birria, Brundisium, Brutus, Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, Caesar's Gallic Wars, Caieta, Caius Popillius Laenas, Capitol Hill, Cassius, Cassius Longinus, Catalina, Cato the Younger, Cicero, Cicero trilogy, Cisalpine Gaul, Cisapline Gaul, Cleopatra, Clodia, Clodius, College of Pontiffs, Conference of Luca, Corfu, Cornutus, Cumae, Cyprus, Decimus Brutus, Demosthenes, dictator, Dio of Alexander, Dolabella, Domitius Ahenobarbus, Dream of Scipio, Dyrrachium, Ealing Comedy, Feast of Saturnalia, fiction, First Triumvirate, Formiae, Fulvia, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Gaius Vibius Pansa, Gaul, Gnaeus Plancius, Gnaeus Pompeius, Helvius Cinna, Ides of March, Isauricus, Italy, Julius Caesar, king of Armenia, King Philip II, L.P. Wilkinson, Labienus, Lake Volsinii, Lentulus Sura, Letters of Cicero, Lucius Calpurnius Bestia, Lupercal, Marcus Antonius, Marcus Calius Rufus, Marcus Cornutus, Marcus Crassus, Marcus Philippus, Marcus Portius Cato, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Metellus Nepos, Mutena, Mutina, novel, Octavian, Octavianus, On auguries, On divination, On duties, On fate, On Friendship, On glory, On the Nature of the Gods, On virtues, Parthian Empire, Philippics, Philotimus, Plutarch's Life of Cicero, Politics, Pompey, Popollius, power, Publilia, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Publius Crassus, Publius Lentulus Sura, Publius Vatinius, Quintus Cicero, River Rubicon, Robert Harris, Rogue One, Roman Republic, Roman Senate, Rome, Second Triumvirate, Servilia, Sicily, Slavery, St Trinians, Star Wars, Terentia, The Sibyl, Thessalonika, Thrapsus, thriller, Tiro, Titus Annius Milo, Tullia, Tusculan Disputations, Tusculum, Vatinius, War atrocities

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside is universally agreed to be the best of the half dozen or so comedies Middleton wrote or co-wrote. It is yet another comedy about sex and class and money, about corruption and greed and adultery – all the usual subjects – in fact the oppressively narrow range of subjects which Jacobean comedy dealt with. Elizabethan comedy is generally mirthful, while comedy under James I (came to the throne in 1603) becomes more and more disgusted.

These plays are saturated in an atmosphere of sex – not only are the plots about legal and illegal couplings (i.e. marriage and adultery) but right down at the verbal level, almost every word in Jacobean English was packed with sexual double meanings and innuendo.

This thick fog of sexual meaning radiates from just the cast list, before the play itself has even begun. As a little academic exercise I was going to keep a record of the sexual ambiguities mentioned in the notes, but there are four or five on every page and the play is 100 pages long, so it almost immediately became unmanageable.

Cast

Master YELLOWHAMMER, a goldsmith
MAUDLIN, his wife
TIM, their idiot son
MOLL, their daughter – heroine of the play
TUTOR to Tim
SIR WALTER WHOREHOUND, a suitor to Moll who has, for years, been sleeping with and impregnating Allwit’s wife
SIR OLIVER KIX, and his wife LADY KIX – endlessly argue because they can’t get pregnant
Master John ALLWIT, and his wife MISTRESS ALLWIT, whom Sir Walter keeps i.e. he pays for their entire London establishment on the agreement that he can sleep with the wife whenever he’s in town, and has sired on her no fewer than seven children!
A WELSH GENTLEWOMAN, Sir Walter’s whore, who he brings up to London to marry off to dim Tim
WAT and NICK, Whorehound’s bastards by Mistress Allwit
DAVY DAHUMMA, Whorehound’s man
TOUCHWOOD SENIOR and his wife MISTRESS TOUCHWOOD – helpful older brother to…
TOUCHWOOD JUNIOR – the ‘hero’ of the play, in love with Moll, the two young lovers who feature in all these plays
TWO PROMOTERS i.e. officials paid to police the city’s Lent policy i.e. buying, cooking or eating meat is forbidden
Three or four WATERMEN, who get involved in Moll and Young Touchwood’s attempts to escape the City by river
A WENCH carrying Touchwood Senior’s bastard, who confronts him in the street
Jugg, Lady Kix’s MAID
A DRY NURSE and A WET NURSE for Lady Mistress Allwit’s baby
TWO PURITANS, the first named Mistress Underman
FIVE GOSSIPS, a word which means both middle-aged wives and godmothers
A PARSON – drafted in to hurriedly marry Young Touchwood and Moll in Act 5
SUSAN, Moll’s maid – who is instrumental in the final plot

Smut

The play opens with Moll playing on the virginals – nudge nudge – and her mother, Maudlin, chastising her for missing her dancing classes, commonly associated with sexual opportunity. Page two starts with a pun about the size of women’s vaginas (‘When I was of your bord’, Maudlin tells Moll, where bord derives from ‘bore’ as of a rifle, i.e. when I had a nice young ****), then goes on to talk about imperfections, cracks and rents in smart fabrics, ‘cracks’ which need to be filled up by a husband, fnah fnah…

And on it goes, three hours of unrelenting smut and obscenity. Every mention of entering, before and after, up and down, standing to attention and so on, are drenched in sexual overtones. Her mother tells Moll she’ll have to get used to kissing her husband ‘when he enters’ and using her hand ‘before and after’ and ‘waving her body’ i.e undulating up and down as in sex – not to mention the wealth of Jacobean slang terms for aspects of sex which crop up in the oddest places – ‘nock’ was a slang term for the female genitals. I don’t think I’ve ever read the words ‘c***’ and ‘f***’ and ‘penis’ used so often in the notes of any text.

The plot

Critics discern five plots in the play:

1. Young love

A straightforward young-couple hampered-love story, namely Moll Yellowhammer (the chaste maid of the title) is the daughter of a wealthy Cheapside goldsmith and his wife. She is in love with dashing Young Touchwood, but her ambitious parents want to marry her off to Sir Walter Whorehound, who has just arrived in town, accompanied by a young woman, his ‘landed niece from Wales’ who they don’t realise is his whore.

2. Tim nice but dim

The Yellowhammers have a son, Tim, who returns from Cambridge with his Latin tutor. Much piss is taken out of his low level classical learning, with Tim and the tutor given a scene where they speak to each other in pig Latin (Act 4 scene 1) and later he speaks to the Welsh niece in Latin and she replies in Welsh so they merrily speak at cross purposes for a bit before servants come in and misinterpret both their speeches.

Anyway, the idea is that Tim will be married off to the landed niece, and he is promised 19 mountains and 2,000 runts (there is much unsubtle wordplay on a rude word which rhymes with run) and indeed, at the end of the play dim Tim and his Welsh whore do get married, in an obvious parody of the happy wedding of the heroes Young Touchwood and Moll, and discovering she has no mountains and no runts, although she does have a nice ….

3. Whorehound’s arrangement

In the most interesting because most genuinely original storyline, Whorehound has been paying Allwit and his wife to live in luxury, in a house with all mod cons, with food on the table every day and a bunker full of Newcastle coal, purely and simply so that he can sleep with Allwit’s wife every time he is in London. Allwit doesn’t mind, he’s been kept in very fine style for ten years! He has a soliloquy (Act 1 scene 2) in which he sings the joys of being a kept cuckold, not for him any worries or cares as long as Whorehound carries on shagging his wife. And his wife is quite happy with the arrangement, too, an occasional loaning out to Whorehound in return for a loving marriage and financial security.

In fact she has proceeded to bear no fewer than seven children to Whorehound, some of whom are 12 or 10-years-old and going to school. They are proudly presented to him on his arrival at the Allwit house and he promises them all financial support.

The other plotlines – frustrated young lovers, idiot young man duped into marrying a whore – these are boringly familiar. But the Whorehound-Allwit plotline feels as if it breaks new ground, and takes things into an entirely new realm of (entertainingly) cynical depravity.

4. The prolific Touchwoods

Meanwhile, Touchwood Senior (the elder brother of Moll’s true love, Young Touchwood) has a scene (Act 2 scene 1) where he tearfully takes leave of his wife. His problem is that he is prodigiously fertile and impregnates any woman he sleeps with, but he is poor. Thus the couple have had umpteen children each one of which impoverishes them further.

we must give way to need
And live awhile asunder, our desires
Are both too fruitful for our barren fortunes.

Little more is heard of Touchwood Senior’s wife, and most of his energy goes, in the second half of the play, into helping his young brother organise eloping with beautiful Moll.

5. The barren Kixes

Finally, there is yet another couple, the Kixes, an aging couple who are the mirror opposite of the Touchwoods in that they have been trying for years for a baby but cannot conceive. The result is an endless cycle of recriminations and arguments in which they blame each other for being barren or sterile before bursting into tears and falling into each others’ arms – as Touchwood witnesses on an embarrassing visit to their house.

As so often, fertility is directly connected with money across a web of relationships, because if they die without an heir, Whorehound will inherit their estate. He is so confident this will not happen that he has been living beyond his means for years, banking on inheriting and paying off his debts. Unfortunately for him, the Kixes’ maid, Jugg, tells them that Touchwood Senior has a special fertility potion which will soon see Lady Kix pregnant and in a sly scene (Act 3 scene 3), Touchwood Senior inveigles his way into Lady Kix’s bed, waves his magic wand and lo! she becomes pregnant.

So those are the five storylines which Middleton confidently and stylishly weaves together to make a play which is brilliantly crafted, and benefits from a really confident and mature interweaving of blank verse, rhymed verse and prose – but which I found utterly unfunny and unmoving. It is brilliantly made – but sterile.

The way the five storylines are interwoven becomes very complicated, but the key highlights are:

– There is an immensely long scene after Mistress Yellowhammer has given birth to another baby, her eighth child by Whorehound and – this is what makes it so long – a large retinue of ‘gossips’ i.e. local merchants wives, and several Puritan neighbours, are all called in to attend what we’d nowadays call a baby shower. The mickey is taken out of the gossipy ladies, and of the two Puritans who get blind drunk, at extreme length. Most modern productions of the play cut the entire scene as it isn’t part of any of the five plotlines and a lot of the force of its contemporary satire has evaporated.

– Similarly, seven pages are devoted to two ‘promoters’, officers who were set to enforce the new and more strict laws enacted under James I to ban the buying, cooking or eating of meat during Lent. Their scene exists solely to demonstrate how utterly corrupt they are, as we see them bullying citizens, all the time keeping the meat they confiscate either to sell to rich patrons or for their own families – until they get their come-uppance when a woman pretends to be caught red-handed with a basket full of meat, only for the promoters to discover a crying baby at the bottom of it for which they thereupon become legally responsible (and it is a hanging offence to abandon or kill).

Like the Puritans in the baby shower scene, it feels as if the promoters have been thrown into the play solely to get the audience laughing, mocking and jeering these popular hate figures.

– There’s a cooly cynical scene where Allwit presents himself to Yellowhammer as himself a remote member of the Yellowhammer family and says he has come to visit out of the goodness of his heart because he knows that they plan to marry their fine daughter off to Sir Walter Whorehound and he (Allwit posing as a Yellowhammer) has the sad duty to inform them that Sir Walter has for many years kept a married woman as whore in London and fathered a brace of bastards by her. Yellowhammer acts shocked and Allwit goes his ways rejoicing that he has scuppered Sir Walter’s plans for getting married (which means that he, Allwit, will remain in the life of luxury because Whorehound will continue swiving his wife indefinitely). What he doesn’t realise is that Yellowhammer doesn’t mind – he still thinks the marriage will bring his family social advantage and, after all, he casually tells the audience, he kept a whore when he was young and fathered a bastard on her (Act 4 scene 1).

– After an initial attempt to elope with Touchwood Junior, Moll is locked up in her room until the wedding with Whorehound. The day before the wedding, she manages to escape through a small hole and flee her parents’ home again – hooray! – but is once again caught just as she was getting into a waterman’s boat to go upriver to meet Touchwood Junior – boo!

Moll is dragged onstage by Yellowhammer’s furious wife, Maudlin, half-soaked from his riverside capture, locked up again and falls into a sickness, partly from the cold water, partly from despair (Act 4 scene 2). Eventually, while Touchwood Senior is visiting, she appears to collapse and to actually expire. Touchwood Senior takes her into the other room to tend her along with a maid. Later it will emerge that he has paid the maid a handsome fee to conspire to pretend that Moll is dead, get her laid in a coffin and brought onstage as if dead in the final scene.

– Touchwood Junior and Sir Walter encounter each other in the street and, as rivals for the hand of Moll, draw swords and fight. They manage to wound each other and stagger off in opposite directions.

– Believing he is dying, Sir Walter staggers to Allwit’s house where he surprises the complaisant couple by sincerely repenting his sins and attacking the Allwits for leading him on to damnation (Act 5 scene 1). Whorehound’s repentance is delivered in a long speech in powerful verse, and I found it the most moving thing in the play.

Still my adulterous guilt hovers aloft,
And with her black wings beats down all my prayers
Ere they be half way up; what’s he knows now
How long I have to live? O, what comes then?
My taste grows bitter, the round world all gall now,
Her pleasing pleasures now hath poisoned me,
Which I exchanged my soul for;

Which makes it all the more bitter when news arrives that Lady Kix is pregnant (hang on, didn’t she only have sex with Touchwood Senior about half an hour ago? No-one cares about timeframes or plausibility, this is the theatre). The point is that the advent of an heir to the Kixes spells financial ruin for Sir Walter and so the Allwits, in a gesture of breath-taking cynicism and cruelty, order their servants to kick Whorehound out onto the street, in fact to get him arrested for murdering Young Touchstone (news of whose demise also arrives by messenger). Super-cynically, they coolly plan to rent out the big house (I think the implication is to turn it into a brothel) and themselves move to a smaller one in The Strand.

– As mentioned above, Moll continues very sick and when Touchwood Senior brings word that his brother has died (as a result of wounds incurred in the duel with Whorehound), she faints and appears to die. Her parents are distraught and, with wild improbability, allow Touchstone Senior and her servant to look after the body. This is where they cook up the plan to convey her in a coffin to the same place where the coffin conveying Young Touchwood will go.

– Thus the climax of the play is reached when, to doleful mourning music, the two coffins are borne onstage containing Moll and Young Touchwood and Touchwood Senior asks the assembled cast whether they would do anything and forgive anyone to see the two young people alive again? Like the audience at a pantomime, everyone shouts ‘Yes’ and so Touchwood Senior orders the young couple to arise from their coffins – and the two young lovers spring up large as life. Hooray!

Now to tie up all the loose ends: 1. Young Touchwood and Moll are married and her parents finally give their blessing, as parents in all these plays eventually do. 2. Dim Tim is married to the Welsh niece, discovers she is a whore, and is jokily challenged by his mother to prove his Latin learning and logic to transmute her into a chaste wife. 3. Lady Kix, as we saw, is now pregnant so she and Sir Oliver are so delighted they promptly promise to support the family of Touchwood Senior, so he’s sorted out. 4. Finally, Touchwood announces that Sir Walter has recovered from his wounds but is now confined to the debtors prison where he is likely to say for a very long time.

Which is a shame because the shamelessness with which he carried out his scandalous arrangement with the Allwits – and then the blistering sincerity of his fear of hell and damnation when he thinks he is dying – were, for me, by far the most vivid and memorable moments in the play.

Thoughts

As with The Roaring Girl, I don’t know whether it’s me or Middleton, but I didn’t find any of the characters or any moments in the play actually funny, and the whole thing left an acrid, metallic aftertaste. This was caused by at least two things:

1. The extended scene where Sir Walter thinks he’s dying and calls down genuine and powerful curses on the Allwits head is very vivid ≥ and then is compounded when they, hearing he is no longer of financial value to them, kick him out on the street, ordering their servants to fetch officers to arrest him, this adds sulphuric acid onto sump oil.

2. The sad music, the slow procession, the widespread weeping and moaning of the cast, of the many gossips and mothers and bystanders at the double funeral of Young Touchwood and Moll was genuinely doleful and depressing, it had real emotional and dramatic impact. So much so that when the lovers then suddenly sprang to their feet and were reunited in a happy marriage, this seemed somehow trivial and superficial. The bleaker narrative felt more true to the play’s tone of rancid cynicism.

So, for me, a page or so of ‘happy ending’ in no way counters the much harsher and bleaker notes struck earlier in the play. It felt like the harsh vision of human nature demonstrated in Ben Jonson’s plays but without the energising zaniness of the fox or the alchemist which redeems his plays.

Middleton is solicitous to please his audience with what they expect; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. (T.S. Eliot on Thomas Middleton)

A final, fairly obvious thought is that the play is titled A Chaste Maid in Cheapside but, of course, the chaste maid – Moll, the young lover – is in many ways the most minor of all the characters; she is easily overshadowed by the cynical Allwits, by her dim brother, and by the monstrous but somehow dramatically powerful figure of Sir Walter Whorehound. At some point I realised that that is the intention, to show how a chaste maid in Cheapside is overshadowed and dwarfed by the corruption all round her.

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

More Elizabethan and Jacobean reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 25, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/25/a-chaste-maid-in-cheapside-thomas-middleton/

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography @ the Barbican

Barbican Art does things big – exhaustively and exhaustingly BIG. To quote the press release:

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography is a major group exhibition that explores how masculinity is experienced, performed, coded and socially constructed as expressed and documented through photography and film from the 1960s to the present day.

The exhibition brings together over 300 works by over 50 pioneering international artists, photographers and filmmakers such as Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Isaac Julien, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager and Catherine Opie to show how photography and film have been central to the way masculinities are imagined and understood in contemporary culture.

300 works! I wonder if anyone’s ever done a study of the optimum number of works which should be included in an exhibition. Or the optimum number of contributors.

The Piranesi exhibition I went to last week contained 60 images and that was too many to process: I ended up studying about ten of the best. But 300 images! And over 50 contributors! Each with a long and detailed explanatory wall label explaining their career and motivation and the genesis and point of their particular exhibit.

It’s less like an exhibition than a degree course!

Untitled from the series Soldiers (1999) by Adi Nes. Courtesy Adi Nes & Praz-Delavallade Paris, Los Angeles

A degree course in Gender Studies. because Masculinities: Liberation through Photography tends to confirm my sense that, for many modern artists and for most modern art curators, gender and sexual identity are the only important subjects in the world. Thus, according to Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican:

‘In the wake of the #MeToo movement and the resurgence of feminist and men’s rights activism, traditional notions of masculinity have become the subject of fierce debate. This exhibition could not be more relevant and will certainly spark conversations surrounding our understanding of masculinity.’

In fact quoting this much makes me think it might be most effective simply to quote the entire press release, so you can see exactly where the Barbican Art curators are coming from, without any editorial comment by me. So here it is:

With ideas around masculinity undergoing a global crisis and terms such as ‘toxic’ and ‘fragile’ masculinity filling endless column inches, the exhibition surveys the representation of masculinity in all its myriad forms, rife with contradiction and complexity. Presented across six sections by over 50 international artists to explore the expansive nature of the subject, the exhibition touches on themes of queer identity, the black body, power and patriarchy, female perceptions of men, heteronormative hypermasculine stereotypes, fatherhood and family. The works in the show present masculinity as an unfixed performative identity shaped by cultural and social forces.

Seeking to disrupt and destabilise the myths surrounding modern masculinity, highlights include the work of artists who have consistently challenged stereotypical representations of hegemonic masculinity, including Collier Schorr, Adi Nes, Akram Zaatari and Sam Contis, whose series Deep Springs, 2018 draws on the mythology of the American West and the rugged cowboy. Contis spent four years immersed in an all-male liberal arts college north of Death Valley meditating on the
intimacy and violence that coexists in male-only spaces.

Complicating the conventional image of the fighter, Thomas Dworzak’s acclaimed series Taliban consists of portraits found in photographic studios in Kandahar following the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, these vibrant portraits depict Taliban fighters posing hand in hand in front of painted backdrops, using guns and flowers as props with kohl carefully applied to their eyes.

Trans masculine artist Cassils’ series Time Lapse, 2011, documents the radical transformation of their body through the use of steroids and a rigorous training programme reflecting on ideas of masculinity without men.

Elsewhere, artists Jeremy Deller, Robert Mapplethorpe and Rineke Dijkstra dismantle preconceptions of subjects such as the wrestler, the bodybuilder and the athlete and offer an alternative view of these hyper-masculinised stereotypes.

The exhibition examines patriarchy and the unequal power relations between gender, class and race. Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen, 1981 to 1983, comprised of 26 black and white photographs taken inside men-only private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from snatched conversations, parliamentary records and contemporary news reports, invites viewers to reflect on notions of class, race and the exclusion of women from spaces of power during Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

“Newspapers are no longer ironed, Coins no longer boiled So far have Standards fallen” from the series Gentlemen, by Karen Knorr (1981 to 1983) © Karen Knorr

Toxic masculinity is further explored in Andrew Moisey’s 2018 photobook The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual which weaves together archival photographs of former US Presidents and Supreme Court Justices who all belonged to the fraternity system, alongside images depicting the initiation ceremonies and parties that characterise these male-only organisations.

With the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement through the 1960s followed by the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s, the exhibition showcases artists such as Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowiz, who increasingly began to disrupt traditional representations of gender and sexuality.

Hal Fischer’s critical photo-text series Gay Semiotics, 1977, classified styles and types of gay men in San Francisco and Sunil Gupta’s street photographs captured the performance of gay public life as played out on New York’s Christopher Street, the site of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising.

Street Fashion: Jock from the series Gay Semiotics, 1977/2016 by Hal Fischer. Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant London

Other artists exploring the performative aspects of queer identity include Catherine Opie’s seminal series Being and Having, 1991, showing her close friends in the West Coast’s LGBTQ+ community sporting false moustaches, tattoos and other stereotypical masculine accessories.

Bo from Being and Having by Catherine Opie (1991) © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Elle Pérez’s luminous and tender photographs explore the representation of gender non-conformity and vulnerability, whilst Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s fragmented portraits explore the studio as a site of homoerotic desire.

During the 1970s women artists from the second wave feminist movement objectified male sexuality in a bid to subvert and expose the invasive and uncomfortable nature of the male gaze. In the exhibition, Laurie Anderson’s seminal work Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity), 1973, documents the men who cat-called her as she walked through New York’s Lower East Side, while Annette Messager’s series The Approaches (1972) covertly captures men’s trousered crotches with a long-lens camera.

German artist Marianne Wex’s encyclopaedic project Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1977) presents a detailed analysis of male and female body language, and Australian indigenous artist Tracey Moffatt’s awkwardly humorous film Heaven (1997) portrays male surfers changing in and out of their wet suits…

Thus the press release for this huge exhibition. I’ve quoted it at length so you can:

get an overview of the exhibition’s contents
get a sense of the thinking behind the exhibition
get familiar with the dated sociological jargon which is used throughout – ‘interrogate’, ‘challenge’, ‘disrupt’, ‘heteronormative’, ‘male gaze’, ‘patriarchy’

So you can see the curators’ point of view and intentions before I start critiquing them.

The complete irrelevance of any of these ‘masculinities’ to my own life and experience

Almost none of the art or artists in this exhibition bore any relation to my experiences as a boy, teenager, young man, adult man, working man, husband, and then father of my own son. I thought it was quite an achievement to feature so much work by so many artists claiming to speak for or about ‘masculinity’ or men, but which managed to touch on so little of my own personal life experiences of ‘masculinity’.

I took photos of the wall captions as I went round the exhibition and so, as a sample, here are the subjects of the first 15 or so displays, with the exact subject matter of the sets of photographs highlighted in bold:

Taliban warriors by Thomas Dworzak
Beirut fighters by Fouad Elkoury
Israeli soldiers by Adi Nes
a video of a close-up of the trousers of a man who urinates in his pants and trousers, so you see the wet patch spreading by Knut Asadam (Pissing by Knut Asdam)
American, German and British soldiers by Wolfgang Tillmans
American cowboys by Collier Schorr
a film by Isaac Julien about American cowboys, The Long Road to Mazatlan
American photographer Sam Contis’s photos of a liberal arts college in the mid-West
American photographer Catherine Opie’s photos of American footballers
American artist Andy Warhol’s movies of male fashion models
American photographer Herb Ritt’s photos of buff Hollywood garage attendants
American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon
Akram Zaatari’s photos of Middle Eastern weightlifters
100 black and white photos of himself wearing y-fronts taken from all angles by Canadian transmasculine performance artist and bodybuilder Cassils
a series of photos by a British photographer of London Fire Brigade firefighters at work and in the showers

Men I know

Down the road from me lives my neighbour Nigel. He regularly goes folk dancing with his wife. At weekends they go for long cycle rides in the country. I helped him with a bit of guerrilla gardening last autumn when we planted daffodils on a patch of waste ground at the end of our road, which are now flowering. Nigel tended one of the allotments at the end of our road, and we’d have lengthy chats about the best plants I could put in my back garden to encourage more birds and butterflies.

Occasionally, we see old Richard go slouching along the road to his allotment where he tends his bee hives and chain smokes. A few years ago he was in the papers, in a photo showing him wearing full beekeeping rig and handing a letter into Number 10 asking for more government help to protect bees.

I shared a house with two friends in my last year at university who did science subjects: Nowadays Tony works for the Worldwide Fund For Nature trying to save the rainforests, and David is a microbiologist who helps develop micro-devices which can be installed within the human body to secrete medicine at regular or required intervals, for example in diabetics.

My boyhood friend Jonathan runs a puppet theatre for schools. Tom works for a seaman’s charity in the East End. Adam works for The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Scotland, monitoring bird populations, nesting habits, tagging birds to follow their migration patterns.

My son is studying biology at university. He’s considering doing a PhD into plant biology with a view to developing more sustainable crops. We play chess when he comes home at the holidays, although I’m always nagging him for frittering away so much of his time playing online video games.

These are ‘masculinities’, aren’t they? These are ways of being male? At least I think Nigel and Richard and Tom and Jonathan and Tony and David, Adam and Luke and I are men. Aren’t we?

But there was nobody like us in this exhibition, what you could call ‘normal’ people. Not a hint of men who like birdwatching, or gardening, or keeping bees, or study plant science, or like folk dancing, or are helping the environment.

Instead this exhibition’s view of masculinity is almost deliriously narrow: alternating between ridiculous American stereotypes of huge steroid-grown athletes or shouting fraternity members, and equally stereotyped images of flamboyant, make-up wearing gays working in nightclubs or part of the uber-gay communities of downtown New York or San Francisco’s Castro district. It is an exhibition of extremes and stereotypes.

Paul, who I worked with for all those years in TV, wasn’t camp or flamboyant, he was just a guy who liked a beer and a laugh and happened to be gay. As was his boyfriend. As was Edwin, the Viking-looking giant with a beard who I worked with at a government agency, who also just happened to be gay, it was no big deal, and really hated the way everyone expected him to conform to ‘gay’ stereotypes.

Exactly the kind of dated gay stereotypes which exhibitions like this promote and propagate.

The British art establishment’s slavish worship of American culture

Once again I find it weirdly unself-aware that an exhibition which so smugly uses words like ‘transgressive’, ‘interrogate’, ‘disrupt’ and ‘subvert’ about its exhibits, is itself so completely and slavishly in thrall to American photographers and American subject matter and so utterly kowtows to the cultural dominance of The Greatest City in the World (if you’re an art curator) – which is, of course, New York.

The Barbican is in London. Which is in England. Not in New York or San Francisco. And yet only one of the first fifteen or so of the featured photographers was British, and I can only remember two or three other Brits among the remaining 35 or so exhibitors.

The art élite

So by about half way through the exhibition it had dawned on me that there is a very strong political element to this show, just not the one the curators intend. It is that:

Once again an exhibition about gender and race and identity proves beyond doubt the existence of a transnational art élite, made up of international-minded, jet-setting artists and photographers and film-makers, and their entourage of agents and gallery curators, who have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of the populations of their host countries.

What I mean is that the curators and critics who’ve selected the works and written the catalogue of a show like this have much more in common with their counterparts in the art worlds of New York or Berlin or Shanghai than they do with the men or women in the streets of their own cities. They speak the same art language, use the same art theory buzz words and jargon, all agree on the wonderfulness of New York, and all share the same supremely woke and politically correct attitudes to LGBT+ and transgender and BAME rights which, the exhibition strongly implies, are the most important political or social issues anywhere in the world.

They liberally throw around words like ‘elite’ and criticise pretty much all white men for their ‘privilege’. It obviously doesn’t occur to them that being part of the jetsetting, international circuit of artists and art curators is also to belong to a privileged élite.

As a small symbol of this, after having read a host of wall labels castigating élite, men-only, members-only clubs and fraternities – which had the result of hyper-sensitising me to the the wickedness of these restrictive organisations – I couldn’t help smiling when I read on the Barbican website about an ‘exclusive Members’ talk’ which is available to Barbican members only.

Masculinities: Liberation through Photography: Members’ pre-exhibition talk

Preaching to the converted

And so when I watched the curator of the exhibition speaking to the assembled journalists, critics and reviewers about #MeToo and toxic masculinity, and watched the approving nods and murmurs of her audience, I realised she was praising the values and priorities of the art world and its ferociously politically correct denizens, to exactly the kinds of journalists and critics who inhabit that world and attend these kinds of launches. And it crossed my mind that I had rarely in my life seen a purer example of ‘preaching to the choir’ and reinforcing entrenched groupthink.

Initial summary

To summarise so far:

It felt to me that the exhibition is wildly, almost hallucinatorily partial, misleading and inaccurate about its purported subject matter – masculinity. It simply ignores and neglects almost everything I think about when I think about my own and other men’s masculinity.
But what it undoubtedly is, is a handy survey of the deeply entrenched anti-heterosexual, anti-male, anti-white, pro-feminist, pro-black, pro-queer attitudes which now dominate universities, colleges, the art world and art galleries. So the exhibition has this additional layer of interest which is as a fascinating sociological specimen of the current attitudes and terminology of the über-woke.

I’m not against or opposed to those positions and views, in fact I broadly support them (pro-feminism, pro-LGBT+, anti-racism etc). I’m just modestly suggesting that there’s more to the world of men than this polemical and extremely limited exhibition – either American footballers or street queens of New York – gets anywhere near suggesting. In fact there is much more to culture, and politics, and the world, than a relentless obsession with ‘gender’.

Highlights

Having got all that off my chest, you may be surprised to learn that I really enjoyed this exhibition. There’s so much stuff on show they can’t help having lots of really good and interesting art here, and – as usual with the Barbican – it is presented in a series of beautifully designed and arranged spaces. So:

I loved Herb Ritts‘ pinup-style black-and-white photos of incredibly buff and sexy (male) garage hands, stripped to the waist.

Herb Ritts photos of gorgeous men

What’s not to love about Robert Mapplethorpe‘s photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lisa Lyon in their bodybuilding prime?

Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of Lisa Lyons on Pinterest

I really liked Akram Zaatari‘s photos of Middle Eastern weightlifters: he found a trove of badly degraded, faded, marked and damaged photos, then blew them up to wall size, warts and all. The weightlifters are dressed in loose loincloths, a world away from the slick professionalism of Schwarzenegger et al, and then further removed by the spotty blotchy finish of the damaged negatives. I like all art which shows the marks of industrial processes, decay, found objects, Arte Povera etc, art which records its own struggle to emerge from a world of chaos and war.

Bodybuilders Printed From A Damaged Negative by Akram Zaatari (2011)

I liked the work of German feminist photographer Marianne Wex. In the 1970s she made a whole set of collages where she cut out magazine images of men sitting with their legs wide apart and juxtaposed these with magazine images of women sitting primly with their legs tight together. This was funny for all sorts of reason, but also had multiple levels of nostalgia: for the black and white world of 1960s and 70s magazines (and fashions – look at the hair and the flares on the men).

Let’s Take Back Our Space by Mariane Wex

There was a room on the ground floor which I nicknamed ‘The Grid Room’ which contained three massive sets of images laid out as grids, and which I liked simply because I like big grids and matrices, geometric and mathematical designs, in the same way as I like Carl Andre’s bricks. The grids are:

1. German-American photographer Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen (1981 to 1983) consists of 26 black-and-white photographs taken inside men-only, private members’ clubs in central London and accompanied by texts drawn from conversations Knorr claims to have overheard.

a) they’re strikingly composed and arranged photos
b) the overheard conversations are amusingly arrogant and pompous, if a little too pat to be totally plausible
c) but what makes this funniest of all is that Knorr is surprised that the inhabitants of expensive, members-only private clubs will be a bit, you know, pompous

2. Back in the 1990s Polish-American photographer Piotr Uklański created a vast, super-wall-sized collage of A4-sized publicity photos of Hollywood actors dressed as Nazis from a host of movies.

It is 18 columns by 9 rows, which means it shows the images of 162 actors playing Nazi. The wall label suggested that the work is an indictment of Hollywood and its trivialisation of atrocity and, in the context of this exhibition, it is also meant to be an indictment of ‘toxic masculinity’ and the hyper-masculinity promoted by the Nazis.

But look at it. It isn’t really either of those things. What it obviously is, is an invitation to identify the actors and the movies they’re in, lots of fun in a Where’s Wally kind of way. Can you spot Clint Eastwood from Where Eagles Dare, Lee Marvin in The Dirty Dozen, Leonard Nimoy from the spisode of Star Trek where they beam down to some planet which is having a Nazi phase?

And then, for me, any serious intention was undermined when I noticed that two of the belong to Monty Python actors Michael Palin and Eric Idle dressed as Nazis (6 rows down, 10 and 11 across). And when I noticed the face of Norman Wisdom (from his 1959 movie, The Square Peg, where Norman is asked to impersonate a Nazi general he happens to look like), I couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

(Having googled this artwork and studied the results, I realise that Uklański changes the arrangement of the photos from site to site, with the order of the faces different in each iteration. The version below gives you an immediate impression of the work’s overall impact – imagine this spread across an entire wall, a big art gallery wall – but in this version Norman’s photo, alas, is absent.)

The Nazis by Piotr Uklanski (1998)

3. The third big grid is a set of 69 black-and-white photos taken by American photographer Richard Avedon and ironically titled The Family, each one depicting key politicians, military men, lawmakers and captains of industry who held the reins of power in America in the Bicentennial year of 1976.

The overt aim is to shock and appal the modern social justice warrior with the fact that almost all the movers and shakers are white men (though I did, in fact, count six women in the grid and two or three black people). But it just didn’t seem too much of a surprise to me that nearly fifty years ago the make-up of the ruling class was different from now or, to put it another way, over the past fifty years the representation of women and black people at the highest levels of American power have changed and improved.

Anyway, any political message was, for me, eclipsed by the hazy memories of the 1970s which these photos evoked — the era when Gerald Ford hastily replaced that excellent American president, Richard Nixon and when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize (1973). There’s a youthful Jimmy Carter (elected President in 1977), a serious-faced Ronald Reagan (another most excellent American President), and gorgeously handsome Teddy Kennedy, for so long the poster boy of liberal Democrats.

Americana

As you can see from the three works in The Grid Room, even when I was trying to overlook it, I couldn’t help noticing the American subject matter or the American provenance of most of the photographers.

The America worship continues into the next room, which is devoted to the American tradition of the college fraternity, and the secret initiation rituals they apparently hold.

Thus artist Richard Mosse made a film by asking members of an American fraternity house to have a shouting competition, with the young student who could shout loudest and longest winning a keg of beer. Having contrived this artificial situation in which he films the faces of young American men shouting their heads off till they’re red in the face, Mosse then described his film as ‘a performance of masculinity and elite, white male rage’.

Is it, though? I’d have thought it was a highly contrived set-up, Mosse bribing the men to act out a certain kind of behaviour which he then turned round and criticised using his modish sociological jargon.

Also note how the word ‘white’ in sentences like that is slowly becoming a term of abuse. Mosse is, of course, himself ‘white’, but he’s the OK sort of ‘white’. He’s artist white.

Next to it is a work by American photographer Andrew Moisey, who spent seven years studying college fraternities and putting together The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual. This, you won’t be very surprised to learn,

explores the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and the toxic culture of American fraternities.

Toxic men. Toxic masculinity. White male rage.

The gay American photographer Duane Michals is represented by a series of photos depicting a grandfather and grandson with an eerie, surrealist vibe.

There’s a sequence of photos by American-based Indian photographer Sunil Gupta, who recorded New York’s gay scene in the 1970s.

Reclaiming the black body

Upstairs, in the section devoted to Reclaiming the Black Body, there’s a series by American photographer Kalen Na’il Roach which are described as explorations of ‘the construction of the African-American family and the absent father’.

Nearby is a set of brilliant photos by black American photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who arranged human bodies in all manner of creative and interesting poses, all shot as clear and crisply as anything by Robert Mapplethorpe. There was a really beautiful, crystal clear and vivid and intimidating and erotic photo of a black man holding a pair of large scissors against his thigh, wow.

Queering masculinity

There’s an entire section of the exhibition devoted to gay masculinity titled Queering Masculinity. Among many others, this contains a set of photos by American photographer George Dureau, ‘a prominent figure in the queer and non-conformist communities in New Orleans’s French Quarter’, which included some disturbing images of a handsome young man with a hippy hairdo who had had both legs amputated right at the top of the thighs, images which didn’t make me think about masculinity at all, but about disability.

The Unexpected Beauty of George Dureau

A corner is given to the technicolour experimental underground film Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) by rebel film-maker Kenneth Anger, which explores the fetishist role of hot rod cars among young American men, and whose soundtrack – Dream Lover by Bobby Darin – wafted gently through the galleries as the visitors sauntered around, looking at these collections of cool, gay and black American photography.

And also upstairs was a fabulous series of black and white shots by American photographer David Wojnarowicz, who got his friends to wear a face mask of French poet Arthur Rimbaud and pose in unlikely locations around New York.

Rimbaud in New York

And there’s work by Peter Hujar, ‘a leading figure in New York‘s downtown cultural scene throughout the 1970s’ who photographed its various gay subcultures.

There’s photos by Paul Mpagi Sepuya, an American photographer from who explores ‘the studio and darkroom as a site of homoerotic desire’.

And photos by Elle Pérez from America which are concerned with ‘the artist’s relationship with their own body, their queerness and how their sexual, gender and cultural identities intersect and coalesce through photography’.

While ‘in her meticulously staged photos, American artist Deanna Lawson (b.1979) explores black intimacy, family, sexuality and spirituality.’

Then there’s American avant-garde artist, composer, musician and film director Laurie Anderson who is represented by her 1973 work Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) which records the men who cat-called her as she walked through New York’s Lower East Side.

One of my favourite sections was black American Hank Willis Thomas’s ironic and funny collages, Unbranded: Reflections In Black by Corporate America which cut and paste together tacky old adverts featuring black people from the 70s, 80s and 90s. As the wall label explains:

Thomas sheds light on how corporate America continues to reproduce problematic notions of race, sexuality, class and gender through the white male gaze.

(Note: ‘the white male gaze’. The male gaze is bad enough but, God, it’s twice as bad when it’s the white male gaze. Just as male rage is bad, but white male rage, my God, that’s unforgiveable. You don’t have to read many of these wall labels to realise that everything is so much worse when it’s white.)

There are photographers and artists from other countries – from the Lebanon, Cameroon, Holland, Ghana, Norway and so on. Even, mirabile dictu, some British artists. But in every room there are American artists and wherever you look there are images of New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, while an American pop song drifts over the images of American cowboys and American bodybuilders and New York gays.

It is a very America-dominated exhibition.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the woke, LGBT+-friendly, feminist, anti-patriarchal and anti-white curators are willing to disrupt, subvert, interrogate and question every received opinion, stereotype and shibboleth about the world today except for one – except for America’s stranglehold on global art and photography, except for America’s cultural imperialism, which goes unquestioned and uncommented-on.

Before this form of imperialism, British art curators bow down and worship.

Second summary

Well, if you’re a white man and you enjoy the experience of being made to feel like a privileged, white racist, elitist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist pig by lots of righteous black, gay and women photographers, this exhibition will be right up your street.

But having said all that, I did, ultimately, and despite everything, really enjoy it. In fact I might go back for seconds. There is a huge amount of visually interesting and varied work in it and, as I’ve explained – to take the whole thing on a completely different level – it is a fascinating sociological study of up-to-date, woke and politically correct attitudes and sociological terminology.

And also because the picture of Norman Wisdom dressed as a Nazi was so utterly unexpected, so surreally incongruous among the rest of the po-faced, super-serious and angry feminist rhetoric that I was still smiling broadly as I walked out the door.

Norman Wisdom as General-Major Otto Schreiber in the hit movie, The Square Peg (1959), subverting seriousness

Dated

Not only does the exhibition mostly deal in types and stereotypes, but so many of them are really dated.

The concept of ‘the male gaze’ was invented in a 1975 essay by film critic film critic Laura Mulvey. Not one but two quotes from it are printed in large letters across the walls of feminist section of the exhibition, rather like the Ten Commandments used to be put up for the whole congregation to learn in a church.

Karlheinz Weinberger’s photos of leather-clad rebels date from the early 1960s.

Kenneth Anger’s film Kustom Kar Kommandos is from 1965.

Annette Messager’s series The Approaches is from 1972.

Laurie Anderson’s piece is from 1973.

Richard Avedon’s set, The Family, was shot in 1976.

Sunil Gupta’s street photographs of gay New Yorkers are from the mid-1970s

Hal Fischer’s amusing photos of gay street fashion are from 1977.

Marianne Wex’s project ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures’ dates from 1977.

David Wojnarowicz’s briliant series ‘Rimbaud in New York’ was taken between 1977 and 1979.

Andy Warhol’s film about male models is from 1979.

Hank Willis Thomas’s funny collages use magazine photos from the 1970s and 80s

Karen Knorr’s series about knobs at posh clubs were shot from 1981 to 1983.

Herb Ritts’ photos of stunning hunky men date from 1984.

Now of course a lot of the other pieces are from more recently, from the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, and I am deliberately cherry-picking my evidence, but you get my point.

If the whole issue of gender and masculinity is as hot and urgent and topical as the curators insist, why are they going back to the 1960s and 1970s to illustrate it? My answer would be that, although many of its details have been subsequently elaborated and extended, the basis of the curators (and most of the artists’) liberate worldview date back to the late 60s and early 70s, the era which saw the real breakthroughs for modern feminism, gay rights, and a more ambitious form of black civil rights.

In other words, when you go to a contemporary exhibition of feminist art or gay art or lesbian art or politically motivated black art, you are in fact tapping into movements which have been around for about fifty years. This what gives them a curiously dated, almost nostalgic feeling. The artists and the curators may try to dress these tried-and-tested approaches up in the latest buzzwords or drum up some fake outrage by mentioning the magic words ‘Donald Trump’, but I remember going to exhibitions by gay and lesbian and feminist and black artists in the 1980s, and 1990s, and 2000s, and 2010s which all said more or less what this one does: Blacks are oppressed, women are oppressed, gays and lesbians are oppressed.

For an exhibition which is claiming to address one of the burning issues of our time it seemed curiously… dated. All these carefully printed photographs and films, how very retro, how very 1970s they seem. It’s as if the internet, digital art and social media have never happened. I described the exhibition to my daughter (18, feminist, studied sociology, Instagram and social media addict) and she said it sounded boring and preachy. Yep.

Counting the countries of origin

It’s good to count. Actually counting and analysing the data about almost any subject almost always proves your subjective impressions to be wrong, because all of our unconscious biases are so strong.

Irrationality: The Enemy Within by Stuart Sutherland (1992)

Thus when I looked up the countries of origin of all the photographers represented in this exhibition, I realised the raw facts prove me wrong in thinking that most of the exhibitors are American. Out of 54 exhibitors, some 23 were born in the States and another 3 or 4 emigrated there, so the number of ‘American’ photographers is only just about half of those included.

This exercise also highlighted the true range of other nationalities represented, which I had tended to underestimate. There are, for example, seven Brits, double the number I initially remembered.

However, these figures don’t quite tell the full story, since a number of contributors might not be from the USA, but are represented by their images of the USA. Thus Sunil Gupta is from India but is represented by a suite of photos from 1970s New York (as well as a second series of photos about gay life in India).

Isaac Julien is a British artist but is represented by two movies, one about American cowboys and one – a big one which has one of the Barbican’s entire alcoves devoted to it – a black-and-white movie set in a glamorous American cocktail bar, and set to evocative American cocktail jazz.

To really establish the facts on this one issue of American influence, I suppose you’d have to itemise every single one of the images or films on show and indicate whether they were American in origin or subject matter – which is a little beyond the scope of the present review, and possibly a little mad.

Here’s the complete list of photographers represented in this exhibition with their country of origin, which can be roughly summarised as: the exhibition includes as many American, American-based, or America-covering photographers as those from the rest of the world put together.

Bas Jan Ader (Dutch)
Laurie Anderson (USA)
Kenneth Anger (USA)
Liz Johnson Artur (Ghanaian-Russian)
Knut Åsdam (Norway)
Richard Avedon (USA)
Aneta Bartos (Polish-American)
Richard Billingham (UK)
Cassils (Canada)
Sam Contis (USA)
John Coplans (UK emigrated to USA)
Jeremy Deller (UK)
Rineke Dijkstra (Holland)
George Dureau (USA)
Thomas Dworzak (Germany)
Hans Eijkelboom (Holland)
Fouad Elkoury (Lebanon)
Hal Fischer (USA)
Samuel Fosso (Cameroon)
Anna Fox (UK)
Masahisa Fukase (Japan)
Sunil Gupta (India)
Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola)
Peter Hujar (USA)
Isaac Julien (UK)
Rotimi Fani-Kayode (Nigeria)
Karen Knorr (German-American)
Deana Lawson (USA)
Hilary Lloyd (UK)
Robert Mapplethorpe (USA)
Peter Marlow (UK)
Ana Mendieta (Cuba, moved to New York)
Annette Messager (France)
Duane Michals (USA)
Tracey Moffatt (Australia)
Andrew Moisey (USA)
Richard Mosse (Ireland)
Adi Nes (Israeli)
Catherine Opie (USA)
Elle Pérez (USA)
Herb Ritts (USA)
Kalen Na’il Roach (USA)
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (USA)
Collier Schorr (USA)
Clare Strand (UK)
Mikhael Subotzky (South Africa)
Larry Sultan (USA)
Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany)
Hank Willis Thomas (USA)
Piotr Uklański (Polish-American)
Andy Warhol (USA)
Karlheinz Weinberger (Switzerland)
Marianne Wex (Germany)
David Wojnarowicz (USA)

Third summary: why American influence is so malign

The reliance on exaggerated American stereotypes of masculinity explains why the exhibition simply omits the vast majority of male experience

American attitudes to masculinity – American images of masculinity – are grossly exaggerated, hyper-commercialised, and do not represent the experience of masculinity of men from other countries.

(Possibly they don’t even represent the experience of most men in America itself: just on the curators’ favourite subject of ethnic minorities, about 18% of Americans are Latino, compared to only 12% or so who are black. But I don’t think I saw any images of Latinos, or the names of any Latino photographers or artists anywhere in the show. To adopt the curators’ own values of diversity: Why not?)

So one way to sum up this exhibition (it’s so huge I’m aware that there are, potentially, lots of ways to do this – a feminist take, a view which focused more on the gay or black or non-western perspectives) is to posit that the Americanness of half the exhibition, photos and photographers – and the overall sense you have of the exhibition’s cultural narrowness and exaggeration – are intimately connected.

Reading my way carefully around the exhibition reminded me all over again – as hundreds of documentaries and articles and news reports have over the past few decades:

just how polarised American society has become
how a great deal of this polarisation is in the realm of culture
and how exhibitions like this tend to emphasise, exaggerate and exacerbate that atmosphere of poisonous polarisation

The relentless criticism of toxic masculinity and the male gaze and manspreading and men-only organisations, along with the continual suggestion that being white is a crime, have their ultimate source in the turbo-charged feminism, political correctness and woke culture of American universities, art schools and liberal media.

My point is that the the poisonous cultural politics of America are deeply rooted in the extremes images of masculinity which America developed since the Second World War – and that these extremes, along with the anger and vilification they prompt on both sides of the political and cultural divide – are just not applicable outside America.

Does Norway have a massive film industry devoted to promoting impossibly buff and hunky images of super-tough men? Is French culture dominated by the ideal of the gunslinging cowboy? Is Czech sporting life dominated by huge, testosterone-charged American footballers? In 1950s did Greek husbands throw open the doors to their suburban houses and shout, ‘Hi honey, I’m home!’

No. Since the war many European countries, led by France, have vehemently resisted the bubblegum stereotypes and crass vulgarity of American culture. The American example just doesn’t apply to Swiss watchmakers and French winegrowers and Greek hotel owners and Italian waiters.

Obviously accusations of patriarchy and sexism and toxic masculinity and the male gaze and white anger can be, and routinely are, levelled at all men in any Western society, but my suggestion is that the level of anger and rancour which politically correct and woke culture have reached in America is unique.

America has morphed during my lifetime into a violently aggressive and angry society which stands apart from all other industrialised countries (look at the levels of gun crime, or the number of its citizens which America locks up, 2.2 million adults, more than all the other OECD nations put together).

The anger of American liberals against Trump has to be witnessed to be believed, but so does the anger of American conservatives and the mid-West against the tide of immigrants and liberals who they think are ruining their country. America has become a swamp of hatreds, and it is an American civil war, it is not mine.

And here’s my point – an exhibition which defines ‘masculinity’ very heavily through the lens of such an unhealthy, sick and decadent society is giving a wildly twisted, biased, partial and inaccurate impression of what the word ‘masculine’ even means because it is deriving it very heavily from a culture which is tearing itself apart. We are not all American footballers or New York gay pioneers.

So although only half the exhibition is made up of American photographers and American subjects, nonetheless the poisonous rhetoric of the American cultural civil war (‘toxic masculinity’, ‘white rage’, ‘the male gaze’) infects the conception, selection and discourse of the exhibition so thoroughly from start to finish, that it helps explain why the vast majority of much more humdrum, down-to-earth types of non-American, everyday masculinity – the kinds you or I encounter among our families and friends and at work, the kind I experience when I help Nigel plant the daffodil bulbs in the waste ground at the end of our road – are so utterly absent from this blinkered and biased exhibition.

Other Barbican reviews

All my other Barbican reviews on the Art and Exhibitions page

More photography reviews

All my photography reviews

3 Comments

by Simon on February 23, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in America, Art, Exhibition, Feminism, Film, Photography, Politics

Tagged #metoo, Adi Nes, AIDS, Akram Zaatari, American football, Ana Mendieta, Andrew Moisey, Andy Warhol, Aneta Bartos, Angola, Anna Fox, Annette Messager, Arnold Schwarzenegger, art, Arthur Rimbaud, Barbican, Barbican Art, Bas Jan Ader, Being and Having, Beirut, bodybuilding, Cassils, Catherine Opie, Christopher Street, Clare Strand, Collier Schorr, Cuba, David Wojnarowicz, David Wojnarowiz, Deana Lawson, Deanna Lawson, Deep Springs, Duane Michals, Elle Pérez, Eric Idle, exhibition, family, fatherhood, Feminism, film, Fouad Elkoury, Gay Liberation Movement, Gay Semiotics, gender, George Dureau, Gerald Ford, Hal Fischer, Hank Willis Thomas, Hans Eijkelboom, Henry Kissinger, Herb Ritt, Herb Ritts, heteronormativity, Hilary Lloyd, Hollywood, homoerotic desire, hypermasculinity, identity, India, Ireland, Isaac Julien, Israel, Israeli soldiers, Jane Alison, Japan, Jeremy Deller, Jimmy Carter, John Coplans, Kalen Na'il Roach, Karen Knorr, Karlheinz Weinberger, Kenneth Anger, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Knut Asadam, Knut Åsdam, Kustom Kar Kommandos, Larry Sultan, Laurie Anderson, Lebanon, Let's Take Back Our Space, LGBTQ+, Liz Johnson Artur, London Fire Brigade firefighters, Marianne Wex, Masahisa Fukase, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, masculinity, men, Michael Palin, Middle Eastern weightlifters, Mikhael Subotzky, Monty Python, Nazis, New Orleans, New York, New York’s Lower East Side, Nigeria, Norman Wisdom, patriarchy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Peter Hujar, Peter Marlow, photography, Piotr Uklański, power, queer identity, Richard Avedon, Richard Billingham, Richard Mosse, Richard Nixon, Rineke Dijkstra, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ronald Reagan, Rotimi Fani Kayode, Sam Contis, Samuel Fosso, sexuality, South Africa, stereotypes, Sunil Gupta, Supreme Court Justices, Taliban, Teddy Kennedy, The American Fraternity: An Illustrated Ritual Manual, the American West, The Approaches, the black body, the cowboy, The Long Road to Mazatlan, the male gaze, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Square Peg, the Stonewall Uprising, Thomas Dworzak, toxic masculinity, Tracey Moffatt, trans, transgender, US Presidents, video, Wolfgang Tillmans

Posted by Simon on February 23, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/23/masculinities-liberation-through-photography-barbican/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged power

Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

Types of power

Richard Aldington’s factual introduction

The Australian landscape

Synopsis

Fear of foreigners / xenophobia

Somers’ conflicted attitude

Harriet’s attitude

More plot

Chapter 11. Willie Struthers and Kangaroo

Chapter 12. The nightmare

Antisemitism

Chapter 13. ‘Revenge!’ Timotheus Cries

Chapter 14. Bits

Breaking the fourth wall

Chapter 15. Jack Slaps Back

Chapter 16. A Row in Town

Chapter 17. Adieu Australia

Summary

Credit

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‘Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ by Barbara Kruger @ Serpentine South

‘No Comment’

Text and commentary

1. The Biter Bit

2. Cultural politics turn out to be stunningly counter-productive

3. It’s a generational thing

The merch

Night falls

Related link

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Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art @ the Barbican

Big and beautiful

Textile as a medium

Exhibition aims

‘Hard-luck stories’

Favourites

‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018)

‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019)

Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012)

Igshaan Adams

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993)

Hammock by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003)

Conclusion

Participating artists

Related links

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Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)

Tiro’s memoirs

Sources

Part one: Exile (58 to 47 BC)

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Part two: Redux (47 to 43 BC)

Key themes

Politics

Power

The law

War atrocities

Family ties

Dated diction

Scraps

Credit

The Cicero trilogy

My Cicero reviews

Roman reviews

Robert Harris reviews

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A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)

Cast

Smut

The plot

1. Young love

2. Tim nice but dim

3. Whorehound’s arrangement