Pat Rogers

Pat Rogers, a professor of English at the University of Bristol, is the author of a study of Robinson Crusoe and of Hacks and Dunces: Pope, Swift and Grub Street.

Old Stragers

Pat Rogers, 7 May 1981

Is stage-history much use finally? Finally, that is, beyond all this fiddle over plans and parterres and side-boxes, the cost of nails and packthread, the greenroom gossip? I concede straight away that if you are mounting a performance, as they say, ‘in period’, then you need the basic historical dimensions and data, just as when you are playing ‘authentic’ baroque music you have to tune your strings to the right pitch. And if you are reconstructing the second Globe in Detroit, or for that matter re-erecting the Holborn Empire in Holborn, you cannot allow much latitude to guesswork. But those are special requirements, and most readers of these books will be calling up theatrical history for a broader range of in-sights. Their hopes will be only partially fulfilled.

Public Life

Pat Rogers, 1 April 1982

The original title of Christa Wolf’s novel, Kindheitsmuster, could mean something like ‘a pattern of childhood’, but her translators have rightly gone for a more idiomatic expression. In turning the noun into an attributive adjective, they’ve stressed the idea of an exemplary upbringing, and that is wholly apt. The career of Nelly Jordan is normative, within a certain German (though here specifically Nazi) tradition. Furthermore, she stands for a generation, and for part of a race. Whilst there’s no suggestion that the pattern will in any way be replicated under very different political conditions, the book does present the German experience in the Hitler era as something intelligible, even logical. There is play with the notion of Verfall (‘decay’, but also ‘forfeit’, ‘lapse’): ‘No other language knows verfallen in the sense of “irretrievably lost, because enslaved by one’s own, deep-down consent”.’ What this consent amounts to is at the heart of a powerful and finely sustained novel.

Ambassadors

Pat Rogers, 3 June 1982

By the Western calendar, the events chronicled in Shusaku Endo’s latest novel take place between 1613 and 1624. But of course that is an artificial way of looking at the matter. Half the book takes place in Mexico and Europe; Endo has the cosmopolitan range of a partly ‘Westernised’ figure, educated in the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, the heart of the issue concerns Japan, ‘a wall with windows no larger than gunports, windows to keep an eye on those coming in, not to look out upon the wider world’. We are encouraged by the translator’s postscript, and by one or two unguarded phrases in the text, to see the book as a metaphysical disquisition, a scrutiny of the nature of politics in any time or place. But the specifics are more imaginatively vital than any abstract moralising. Endo is, pace many commentators, pervaded by history: the morality emerges from that history.

Pepys’s Place

Pat Rogers, 16 June 1983

The completion of the new Pepys edition is certainly a publishing event, and thanks to the 350th anniversary of the diarist’s birth it has turned into a media event as well. But is it a literary event, exactly? When the first volume appeared in 1970, the editors laid some stress on their author’s ‘essentially artistic gift’, and suggested that the work was written as though ‘by an alter ego, by another man in the same skin, one who watched understandingly but rather detachedly the behaviour and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger literary deal than just ‘a concomitant of Pepys’s delight in book-keeping’, points in the right direction. The work somehow retains its currency as ‘one of the great classics of literature’ (to stick with Matthews), without often being read or assessed as literature. Books such as Boswell’s Johnson and Macaulay’s History once gave rise to the same apparent category error, but they have long since received the full hermeneutic treatment. So far Pepys has survived intact, greater in the public imagination than his own words. The fulfilment of this outstanding scholarly enterprise makes one speculate how long he can preserve this state of innocence.

Tristram Rushdie

Pat Rogers, 15 September 1983

Four titles, and an abstract noun apiece – well, Melvyn Bragg has two, but it’s the well-known coupling as in (exactly as in, that’s rather the trouble) a fight for love-’n’-glory. Salman Rushdie’s word is a real operative concept, indeed a kind of virtue insistently contrasted with shamelessness. A.N. Wilsons term is more ironic and oblique, suggestive of the British public in a fit of morality: you get the sense that maybe too much of a fuss is about to be made of something. Sylvia Murphy’s knowledge is, to start with, not abstract at all, since it refers to a kind of encyclopedia or dictionnaire des idées reçues. All of these titles point to something about the book in question, I suppose, but none quite hits its central merit or interest. And it does play into the hands of that slack critical cliché, where a work is always found to be (weak copulative) about (weaker preposition) something. Half-baked analysis may cry out for ‘Themes’, but creators who know different shouldn’t go along with this reduction.–

Puppeteer Poet: Pope’s Luck

Colin Burrow, 21 April 2022

Alexander Pope wrote in an age of Party – in the political rather than Downing Street sense – and his kind of intelligence was exactly attuned to an environment in which different groups of people...

Read more reviews

Samuel Johnson would not have had the term ‘Curlism’ in mind when he expressed regret that, even as his dictionary was being printed, ‘some words are budding, and some falling...

Read more reviews

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

There is a sinister painting by the 18th-century artist Francis Hayman of a couple frolicking on a seesaw. A youth soars triumphantly into the air, but his hold seems precarious. His female...

Read more reviews

Every one values Mr Pope

James Winn, 16 December 1993

Alexander Pope’s talent for inspiring enmity is central to his reputation. His contemporary enemies were impressive in quantity and intensity: J.V. Guerinot’s bibliography of Pamphlet...

Read more reviews

Beast and Frog

John Bayley, 4 November 1993

Death is something that happens to other people: and hence, it might be inferred, the popularity of biography. Those whose lives are recorded die in the last chapter: the rest of us live for...

Read more reviews

Now that the main ideas at large in the 18th century have been elaborately described, students of the period have been resorting to more oblique procedures. In 1968, in The Counterfeiters, Hugh...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences