Extreme Understanding

Jenny Diski

Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun, translated by Michael Hofmann
Penguin, 195 pp, £14.99, January 2008, ISBN 978 0 7139 9907 5

As any adult can tell you – or any adult not given over entirely to mawkish and convenient notions of innocence – children are born spies. Every parent (previously an independent individual pursuing their own interests and desires) knows: a child arrives and it starts to watch you. You are never alone again, not really. There is someone who has arrived and will not go away; who not only watches you but also possesses their own consciousness, has views, puts two and two together and understands more or less than you want them to, but either way distorts the picture you have of your life.

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Vol. 30 No. 7 · 10 April 2008 » Jenny Diski » Extreme Understanding (print version)
Pages 11-12 | 3030 words

Letters

From Bill Barker

Jenny Diski proposes that ‘ventriloquism is clever only when the audience is aware that the dummy is not really speaking’ (LRB, 10 April). She points to a 1950s BBC show with Peter Brough and his dummy, Archie Andrews, asserting that ‘someone was either not thinking very clearly, or being brilliant in an avant-po-mo sort of way’ in putting a ventriloquist on radio. Edgar Bergen and his dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, were a tremendous popular success on radio in the US. The Charlie McCarthy Show was the highest-rated radio programme in 1937, and stars such as Mae West, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis and Nelson Eddy were happy to be invited to meet the dummies on the show.

Bill Barker
East Orleans, Massachusetts

From Garth Clarke

The ventriloquists Peter Brough and Edgar Bergen had more in common than top-rating radio shows: in performance each could clearly be seen moving his lips (Letters, 8 May). Small wonder that they enjoyed their greatest success in a medium where voice characterisation was more valued than visual verisimilitude. Brough’s lip technique was notoriously bad. On one occasion when he mentioned that he would be performing at a particular venue, he was told: ‘You’ll do well there. The lighting is terrible.’

Garth Clarke
Sydney