Prussian Blues

Letters

Vol. 18 No. 22 · 14 November 1996

From Jörg Rademacher

As a student of European rather than German literature I was flabbergasted last year by the harsh reception Ein weites Feld suffered at the hands of critics in Germany. Not only was Grass claimed to be an impotent who had out-written his former genius, but the European stance of this novel was never even acknowledged. It was a pleasure therefore to see Fredric Jameson place Grass in a tradition of European Modernism along with Joyce and Beckett, and, in the context of magic realism, with Faulkner and García Márquez, while pointing out the influence of 19th-century European novel-writing (LRB, 17 October). What is more, Jameson emphasises the dialogic openness of the novel, which was hardly noticed in the controversy last autumn. Grass did not set out to please East German readers: his project was the more ambitious and basically ambiguous one of assigning Germans a place in the New Europe.

Jörg Rademacher
Münster, Germany

From Alison Leonard

Fredric Jameson wonders whether English has an equivalent to the ‘Paternoster’ kind of lift, which proceeds slowly, doorless, from floor to floor, up, over the top and down the other side, and which has to be stepped into and out from pretty precisely. I haven’t found one in the language, but I have found actual lifts in England. I was dramatising Heinrich Böll’s story ‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen’ for Radio 3, and wanted to bring verisimilitude to the moment when Murke takes his terrifying existential trip ‘over the top’ in the Paternoster lift. I phoned some lift companies, who helpfully directed me to specimens in several Northern English universities and the occasional branch of Marks and Spencer (for staff use only). Existentialists, historians, predestinarians and depressives will, like Fonty in Grass’s Ein weites Feld, appreciate the allegorical significance of this chug-chugging piece of early technology.

Alison Leonard
Chester

Vol. 18 No. 23 · 28 November 1996

From Editors, ‘London Review’

Fredric Jameson would like us to say that the science fiction writer he mentioned in his review of Ein weites Feld was Terry Bisson, not Bissell (LRB, 17 October). And while we’re about it we would like to apologise for the socialist who, implausibly, made her way into The First Wives ’Club: a socialite of course was intended (LRB, 14 November).

Editors, ‘London Review’

Vol. 18 No. 24 · 12 December 1996

From Glenn Wood

One English university where Alison Leonard might have found a Paternoster lift (Letters, 14 November) is David Lodge’s University of Rummidge. At least, there was one in the mid-Seventies when Rummidge first appeared in the novel Changing Places. I think the allegorical cycle it is associated with is ‘Northrop Frye’s theory of literary modes’. This particular lift’s finest moment comes in the course of a chase through the English Department involving a crazed academic armed with a shotgun.

Glenn Wood
Wolverhampton

Vol. 19 No. 1 · 2 January 1997

From David Lodge

As Glenn Wood observes (Letters, 12 December 1996), the fictional University of Rummidge in my novel, Changing Places (1975), has a Paternoster lift in its new Arts Faculty building. It is an object of fascination to the visiting American professor, Morris Zapp, and excites in him thoughts and feelings similar, it would seem, to those described in Grass’s novel, and in Heinrich Böll’s short story cited by Alison Leonard (Letters, 14 November 1996). This is the passage briefly alluded to by Glenn Wood:

Morris … loved the Paternoster. Perhaps it was a throwback to his childhood delight in carousels and suchlike; but he also found it a profoundly poetic machine, especially if one stayed on for the round trip, disappearing into darkness at the top and bottom and rising or dropping into the light again, perpetual motion readily symbolising all systems and cosmologies based on the principle of eternal recurrence, vegetation myths, death and rebirth archetypes, cyclic theories of history, metempsychosis and Northrop Frye’s theory of literary modes.

This and other relevant passages in the novel were inspired by the Paternoster in the Muirhead Tower of Birmingham University, constructed in the Sixties. Another of these convenient and wonderfully suggestive machines was installed a little later in the University’s Main Library. Alas, they are no longer in operation. I understand that the cost of meeting the increasingly stringent safety regulations governing their use became prohibitive. The one in the Muirhead Tower has been replaced by a conventional lift, and the one in the Library is concealed behind panels displaying paintings borrowed from the Arts Council.

David Lodge
Birmingham

Vol. 19 No. 2 · 23 January 1997

From Douglas Johnson

David Lodge tells us (Letters, 2 January) that the Paternoster lift in the fictional University of Rummidge, which so fascinated Morris Zapp, is inspired by the Paternoster in the Muirhead Tower of Birmingham University. I think I know how this ‘wonderfully suggestive’ machine came to be installed.

It was in 1964, or possibly a little later. The late Sir Ellis Waterhouse was dean of the Faculty of Arts and I was his assistant dean. The new Arts Faculty Building (later called the Muirhead Building) was in the planning stage, and Ellis attended a number of meetings with the architects and with the Bursar’s department, although it was only rarely that I had to be present. I was surprised, therefore, when Ellis said that the two of us had to go into the city and choose a lift for the new building, unaccompanied by anyone from the Bursar’s department. Thus one morning we were driven into an unknown part of Birmingham and entered a large building. There we were greeted by an affable man who knew our names – and other things, judging by the readiness with which he offered Ellis a particular drink which he always accepted. After some talk we moved to a mezzanine floor from which we had a good view of the Paternoster.

Before long, Ellis was leaping on and off the Paternoster, and as he changed carousels the air was filled with shouts of ‘it’s heaven.’ He certainly did the round trip, but whether he thought the same thoughts as Morris Zapp I cannot say. He was delighted to show that he could jump on and off without spilling any of his drink, and when his glass was refilled he was keen to demonstrate this again. He refused to call the machine a Paternoster but always referred to it as a ‘bain-marie’, which greatly amused the men who were selling it, although I did wonder how many of them knew what a bain-marie was.

Naturally I was obliged to try the machine in my turn and I too experienced a certain exhilaration. But I had to play my part in the team and I asked Ellis if such a lift would be suitable for the Faculty of Arts. He had no doubts, and immediately gave an example. He was, at that time, having a quarrel with one of the classics professors and they were not on speaking terms. It was highly embarrassing for them to find themselves in the same lift when the lifts were of a traditional nature. They were obliged to stand looking at different corners of the lift with Ellis, at least, praying that there would not be a breakdown. But if they were using the bain-marie, then it would be easy to change carousels, and if they both changed together, then that would be delightful. He went on to give another example. It was not often that the Vice-Chancellor came to the Faculty, since we usually had to go to his offices. When he did come he was a bit distant and cool. But if there were a bain-marie then he would take every opportunity to visit the Faculty and would be in high good humour. He would, Ellis said, lose his air of gravitas. And we might hear less about university expansion. Another of our colleagues, a senior lecturer, appeared to spend his time watching what was happening and complaining about it. He had protested officially to me that one of the professors of theology was using a lavatory in the English Department. The installation of the Paternoster, and its working, would keep him occupied. We ought to have it. The decision was taken.

Now I learn from David Lodge’s letter that the lift is no longer in operation. So the story of how we decided on the Paternoster is a story of the past, with little relevance to the present, except as an example of the everyday life of academic folk in the good old days of British universities.

Douglas Johnson
London NW3

Vol. 19 No. 3 · 6 February 1997

From Louise Johnson

The Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield has a fully operational and quite maddening Paternoster lift of the sort David Lodge fell in love with in Birmingham’s Muirhead Tower (Letters, 2 January).

Louise Johnson
Sheffield