Letters

I doubt that any of the pen-pal friendships described in Alexis Peri’s Dear Unknown Friend, reviewed by Miriam Dobson, lasted as long as the one forged by my (Dutch) wife with her (East) German correspondent; it began when they were both teenagers, and 65 years later they are still regularly in touch (LRB, 17 April). My wife should, however, have followed the advice of the American groups, mentioned by Peri, who told correspondents to time their letters to coincide with holidays, when the censors would be busy. After the Wall fell and the Stasi files were opened, we discovered that 42 of her letters had been intercepted and not delivered.

Rachel Careau suggests Nabokov as an example of someone so fluent in a second language that they could go without a dictionary (Letters, 17 April). But Nabokov proves the rule in this matter, not an exception. In Lectures on Literature, he says that to be a good reader one must have imagination, memory, some artistic sense, and a dictionary. ‘If told I am a bad poet, I smile,’ he remarked on another occasion, ‘but if told I am a poor scholar, I reach for my heaviest dictionary.’

Nabokov was said to favour the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, apparently for its inclusion of obscure words. Edmund Wilson, reviewing Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in the New York Review of Books in 1965, asserted that there is no such word as stuss in the English language. Nabokov replied that Wilson ‘should have consulted my notes (and Webster’s dictionary) more carefully’, and criticised his article for its ‘pompous aplomb and peevish ignorance’. ‘I never use Webster,’ Wilson responded.

Ange Mlinko writes evocatively of the ‘juddering, polyvocal, fugal train of clauses’ that distinguishes László Krasznahorkai’s prose (LRB, 20 March). She omits to mention that Herscht 07769, the novel under review, consists of one long, unceasing sentence more than four hundred pages long. What’s more, four long(ish) quotes from the novel are presented in the piece as if each were a self-contained sentence starting with a capitalised first word and ending with a full stop [We were responsible for this – Eds]. That is not in the spirit of the novel’s full-stop-free (and full-stop averse) propulsion. As Krasznahorkai once said, for him the full stop ‘doesn’t belong to human beings, it belongs to God.’

Colin Burrow seems to have it in for the First Germanic Consonant Shift, widely known as Grimm’s Law, though Jacob Grimm shares the intellectual spoils with other philologists, Rasmus Rask in particular (LRB, 20 March). Dry and abstruse as it sounds, every year I have the pleasure of seeing several hundred lightbulbs at a time go on as students discover the way that the sounds of ordinary English words such as heart and cordial relate to each other and how pervasive that correspondence is: tooth and dental; two and dual; hundred and century. Understanding the significance of clues that have been in front of us all this time is no less exciting than the fairy tales.

Francis Gooding lists the guises in which Picasso depicts himself in his prints (‘a cherub, a raddled old pervert … a melancholic clown’ etc), but omits the most famous example: the minotaur (LRB, 20 March). In the Vollard Suite (1930-37), Picasso depicts himself as a sleeping minotaur gazed at by a young girl, as a bushy-headed, burly creature crouched over a sleeping girl, and as a minotaur raping a female centaur with an unsettlingly passive expression on her face. In another print the minotaur is dying, and the hand of a girl who seems to be Marie-Thérèse Walter is reaching out to touch his back, taut with muscle. In Blind Minotaur Led by a Little Girl in the Night, Marie-Thérèse guides him through a crowded nocturnal landscape, her head strangely oversized compared to her body. The confusion of domination and anxiety that runs through the Vollard Suite is represented most aptly by the minotaur, an almost comically virile depiction of the self, removed just far enough from reality to serve as a figure onto which the most primal urges and fantasies can be inscribed.

Michael Wood mentions that Dino Buzzati was a painter ‘as well as’ a writer (LRB, 17 April). This ranking of his talents was a sore point for Buzzati, who regarded himself first and foremost as a painter, while plaintively acknowledging that ‘nobody believes me.’ Writing, he said, not painting, was his ‘hobby’, and to imagine it the other way round was a ‘cruel misunderstanding’. Misunderstanding or not, it wasn’t until 1991, nearly twenty years after his death, that the first major retrospective of his paintings was held, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan.

Tony Wood describes the political journey made by the late Mario Vargas Llosa (LRB, 20 March). Wood neglects one significant factor in the later stages of that shift to the right. It wasn’t just the situation in Cuba or Hungary, or his five-day visit to the Soviet Union, that shifted Vargas Llosa’s politics so irrevocably. It was also the murderous conflict with the Maoist millenarian sect Sendero Luminoso (‘Shining Path’) in his own country. In 1983, Vargas Llosa was appointed to lead an official inquiry into the Uchuraccay massacre, in which a number of Lima-based journalists were murdered in a remote part of the southern Andes where Sendero Luminoso operated. The experience apparently horrified him. Over the next ten years or so, the violence of Sendero Luminoso discredited the left in the eyes of many Peruvians, leaving the hopes of democratic leftists in tatters. The Fujimori semi-dictatorship that finally destroyed Sendero Luminoso has left a threadbare party political system, and severely strained Peruvians’ faith in that system. The baleful figure of the Sendero Luminoso leader, Abimael Guzmán, who was finally arrested in 1992 and died in prison in 2021, haunted Vargas Llosa and his compatriots for decades.

Nandini Das describes the eastern Bengali word jāu, cooked rice porridge, as a borrowing from Mandarin (LRB, 20 March). In fact it isn’t a loanword at all, but what Indian grammarians called a tadbhava: a native word inherited from Sanskrit. The Bengali jāu derives from the Sanskrit yavāgū, a kind of gruel, and ultimately goes back to a Proto-Indo-European word for barley or grain, reconstructed as *yéwos. From the same root we get Lithuanian jãvas (grain), Irish Gaelic eorna (barley), Persian jaw (also barley), and similar words in most languages of northern India.

Fraser MacDonald’s piece about compost reminded me of my time at an agricultural college many years ago (LRB, 17 April). Behind the byre of a nearby farm was a rank, steaming compost heap almost as high as the roof. Just visible at the top were several lush cannabis plants, protected by the heat from the compost.

As a longtime connoisseur of the LRB’s bold approach to hyphenation, I have longed for the day when I would catch the editors splitting a single syllable. Now the day has come: the surname Jahr split after the J (LRB, 17 April, p. 22, column 1, line 32). Alas, the hyphen is missing, leaving me to suspect that the split is not intentional.

Andrew Battarbee describes the way the Iranian embassy siege affected television coverage of the Embassy World Snooker Championship, named for the brand of cigarette that sponsored the event in those days (Letters, 8 May). In his Observer TV column the following week, Clive James summed up the drama. Having shown an embassy being reduced to smoking ashes, he remarked, the BBC left Alex Higgins (an enthusiastic chain-smoker) in Sheffield and cut to London, where the SAS was busy doing the same thing.

Tom Crewe seems to have enjoyed my book Cartomania: Photography and Celebrity in the 19th Century, but claims to have detected several omissions (LRB, 17 April). I’ll put my hand up to politicians, sex and pornography, but I’m flummoxed by his remark that ‘there is nothing, however, on actors, artists or writers.’

The actors Sarah Bernhardt, Lillie Langtry, Clara Rousby (‘the beautiful Mrs Rousby’) and Maud Branscombe are all discussed at some length; Mrs Rousby even has a double-page spread with eight of her many portraits. The list of other thespians who appear either in passing, briefly or in illustrations is long: Charles Fechter, Charlotte Saunders, Carlotta Leclercq, Lydia Thompson (several times), Johnny Clarke, Jimmy Rogers, Patty Oliver, Louisa Swanborough, Frederick Robson, Kate Vaughan (two portraits and an anecdote), Edward Askew Sothern, Ruth Herbert, John Toole, Paul Bedford, George Vining, Adah Isaacs Menken (four portraits and a small scandal), Ada Ward, who quit the stage to join the Salvation Army, and Belle Bilton, who quit the stage to become Lady Dunlo. The memoirs of Gladys Cooper provide reminiscences of the ‘Grand Old Man of Photography’, William Downey.

As for writers, Charles Dickens makes several appearances. His relationship with the photographer Herbert Watkins and, elsewhere, with photography in general are explored in detail, and there are three portraits of him. Also much in evidence is Mary Elizabeth Braddon and the popularity of the ‘sensation’ novel. Other authors in the book include Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Alexandre Dumas père. Max Beerbohm, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle each make a brief appearance. Lewis Carroll and George Sala supply quotes, as do William Wordsworth and Charles Baudelaire. There’s also a chunk from Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil and a synopsis of Mrs Henry Wood’s hugely successful novel East Lynne. Even James Joyce gets a mention. I make that seventeen writers, not including the ones who have since faded into obscurity, such as Charles Reade and Mrs Houstoun.

Artists are less in evidence, but there is a good anecdote concerning William Powell Frith and the problems he faced trying to obtain photographs of all the guests at the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and another concerning the war artist and reluctant sitter Elizabeth Thompson, which involves her carte de visite portrait, her aunt, a bunch of bananas and a Chelsea costermonger’s barrow.