Dan Jacobson

T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. Keats and Embarrassment. The parallel between the title of Christopher Ricks’s new book and that of his earlier study of Keats is not accidental. In each case he takes a state of mind which is usually held to be disadvantageous, humanly and artistically speaking, and offers a critical reexamination of its presence in the work of his chosen author. One sees the polemical point clearly enough. Who would wish to read a book called T.S. Eliot and Piety? Or Keats and Enthusiasm?

In a recent issue of Index on Censorship, Vaclav Havel, the dissident Czech playwright and essayist who has spent long periods in prison, tells the following tale:

Dear God,

What is the purpose of it all? Why do you make such contradictory demands of us? Why do you punish us for doing what you compel us to do? Why have you put us here, in this labyrinthine place, with all its manifold temptations and opportunities for error, its blind alleys and paths to pain, which we are bound sooner or later to follow? Nothing could be clearer than the taste of fresh...

This is how it happens. A door opens. Lights blaze up. An impenetrable blackness is hurled somewhere behind them. Voices of unseen creatures are raised in a hoarse cry. Life streams through me once again, and with it, terror. I run.

Now that Dr Lee has produced a pictorial history of the Anglo-Boer War, one wonders why no one had thought of doing so before. This, of course, is how we are always inclined to greet an unusually good idea. The text accompanying the photographs informs us that the war coincided almost precisely with the birth of photography as a popular hobby. Hostilities between Britain and the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State broke out just two years after George Eastman of Rochester, New York, had produced the Folding Pocket Kodak, the first camera to use ‘cartridge film’. In 1900 East-man brought out the Brownie, which had originally been intended for the children’s market. By the end of the war more than two hundred thousand of these two cameras had been sold to markets outside the United States. Of the almost half-million British and Colonial troops who served in South Africa, Dr Lee estimates that several thousand must have brought a camera with them. In addition, numbers of professional photographers, following in the footsteps of those who had taken their cameras to the battlefields of the Crimea and the American Civil War, got to work.