Letters

‘Sometimes it feeds escape fantasies about happier, freer lands on the other side of the moon,’ Neal Ascherson says of travel writing (LRB, 5 June). ‘This is why Poles and Czechs, for example, nationalities long trapped under the enormous bums of Russian or Germanic empires, used to consume so much gaudy pulp literature about other continents.’ It should be said that hardly any nation on earth has been as productive in converting damp, suffocating misery into travel writing as Britain. Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars devotes the chapter titled ‘I hate it here’ to British writers fleeing their own country, which they found ‘uninhabitable’. Fussell quotes in rapid succession W.H. Auden, asked by an interviewer whether his early works had ‘a sense of being at war with where you are’ (‘Yes, quite’); Cyril Connolly (‘tired of the country … a dying civilisation – decadent, but in such a damned dull way – going stuffy and comatose instead of collapsing beautifully like France’); and D.H. Lawrence (describing the Midlands: ‘the utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty … our towns are false towns – every street a blow, every corner a stab’). After all that, Fussell asks ‘What can one do but hate a place which is …’, followed by a two-column list, filling the better part of a page, of adjectives applied by George Orwell to aspects of British life between 1919 and 1939, which include ‘faecal’, ‘verminous’, ‘lousy’, ‘dim-witted’, ‘meagre’, ‘godless’, ‘sneaking’ and ‘Canadian’.

Although Fussell was describing the views of British writers, not readers, readers seem to have agreed. If travel book consumption is any guide, the British public felt just as unhappy and unfree in the years from Stanley Baldwin to Ted Heath as did the Poles and Czechs after the death of Stalin.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, reviewing Kit Kowol’s book Blue Jerusalem, reflects on the Attlee government’s ‘caution and failure to effect truly radical change’ (LRB, 22 May). Elite institutions and authority, he writes, ‘like the enormously increased power of the state, had been fortified by the war’. I don’t think it was solely the inoculating effect of victory. The mid-century Labour Party was complacent about the establishment in general, and private education in particular, on the basis that these had by then nourished so many of its representatives. At its apex, the upper-middle-class Clement Attlee was a product of Haileybury (founded for the East India Company) and University College, Oxford (where William Beveridge was master when his report was published in 1942). Attlee’s first chancellor of the exchequer was Hugh Dalton, of Eton and King’s, Cambridge, whose father was chaplain to Queen Victoria and tutor to the future George V. He was succeeded in 1947 by the Winchester-educated Sir Stafford Cripps, the son of an attorney general to successive princes of Wales who was first knighted for his service to the royal family and then ennobled as Baron Parmoor. Only 31 per cent of the parliamentary Labour Party, established and financed as a trade-union lobby group two generations back, was by 1945 sponsored by a trade union; its 393 MPs were typically barristers, journalists, teachers and lecturers, bourgeois progressives rather than horny-handed sons of toil.

The point is obvious: these men tended to look past inherited and educational privilege since they personified the progressivism it might occasionally nourish, oblivious to the fact that they were exceptions to the cultural rule. In the light of Labour’s historic pusillanimity on this front, the recent abolition of VAT exemption for private school fees might end up looking like one of this government’s most radical measures.

Rachel Hammersley is right that scholars have long known in general terms why John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon wrote their influential anonymous political column, Cato’s Letters, in the early 1720s (Letters, 5 June). But the ‘unexplored puzzle’ elucidated in one of the chapters of my book What Is Free Speech? is more specific: how did they manage to invent an entirely new way of thinking about politics and public debate, which extolled free speech as the foundation of all liberty? It is especially striking since the rest of ‘Cato’s’ political theory was fairly derivative, repackaging in easily digestible form the thoughts of recent writers such as Algernon Sidney, Charles Davenant and John Locke, as well as older heroes of republican thought such as Machiavelli. It was precisely because Gordon and Trenchard’s four essays on the freedom of speech and the liberty of the press were so original, and so rhetorically far-reaching, that they became so influential. Unfortunately, their arguments on this score were, in fact, a self-serving tissue of deliberate fabrications, glaring contradictions and wilful omissions, designed mainly to justify their own partisan practices. It is one of the many ironies of the history of free speech that they nonetheless eventually inspired the formulation of what is now the most powerful speech law in the world, the First Amendment of the constitution of the United States.

Laleh Khalili suggests that the likes of Palantir, Anduril and others are novel in turning their products into ‘services’, retaining significant control, accruing revenue, and with that, leverage (LRB, 5 June). But traditional ‘prime’ defence contractors have been at it for decades. All key military equipment – from battleships to tanks, drones to high-end combat aircraft – require maintenance, repair and operations services (MRO). Military pilots, naval captains and tank commanders, understandably, are not the most forgiving operators. And without MRO, the equipment won’t work, so defence ministries are locked into long-term programmes.

MRO is expensive. Contractors and their customers in government generally accept that it will cost as much as the initial purchase of equipment. Selling arms is big business, but maintaining it keeps Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Rafael and others in the global defence industry in clover. Against the run of Khalili’s argument, what makes firms in Silicon Valley particularly threatening is the relatively small part defence ministries play in their business models. That makes it easier for them to bite the hand that feeds them.

I wasn’t surprised to read, in David Thomson’s piece, about Terrence Malick’s uncomfortable experience as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford in 1965 (LRB, 22 May). ‘Talking to the Brits,’ he said, ‘was like talking underwater.’ I arrived in Cambridge the same year, at a time when many New Zealanders still spoke of the United Kingdom as ‘home’. I was quickly disabused of this fantasy during my first dinner in hall at Trinity College. I walked in with an old friend and fellow Commonwealth scholar. Barely had we sat down than two louche undergraduates appeared opposite. ‘Oh, hello Clive,’ one said, ‘how did you spend the vac?’ ‘I had an absolutely super time, Rupert,’ the other replied, ‘because I went to Kenya [pronounced ‘Keenya’] and stayed with some family friends in the White Highlands. And … well … the extraordinary thing about these colonials, you see, is that the men are amazingly undersexed, while the women are all unbelievably oversexed. So, as you can imagine, one does have a simply marvellous time!’ At that point, my companion, whom I could sense bridling throughout the exchange, burst out (in a somewhat exaggerated Kiwi accent): ‘Fucken balls, mate!’ ‘Oh,’ one of them said, in tones of mock astonishment, ‘are you from the colonies? Which one? New Zealand? Really? Tell me, do you still have – what are they called … Maowis there? Are they still eating people?’ We were underwater indeed; and it was some time before we learned to use a snorkel.

Paul Frecker refers to a carte de visite of Ada Ward, an actor ‘who quit the stage to join the Salvation Army’ (Letters, 22 May). Ward quit the stage in 1897, the same year that another actor, Florence Worth, became a Salvationist. Worth was known as ‘the converted actress’ and a carte showing her ‘before’ and ‘after’ her conversion was issued by Leonard C. Rudd in Newcastle.

Such was the celebrity of leading members of the Salvation Army in the 1880s and 1890s that cartes de visite of many of them (including members of the founding Booth family) were brought out by leading commercial studios, principally Elliott & Fry, as well as Eason in Hackney, where Salvationists were a common subject. The Salvation Army even set up its own commercial photographic studio in 1893 as part of its headquarters on the Clerkenwell Road, which produced cartes de visite of its own until around 1900.

Colm Tóibín’s essay about Pope Leo and the Roman Catholic Church correctly identifies the Latin Mass as a proxy for conservative discontent (LRB, 22 May). But his advice for the new pontiff – deal quietly with the Latin Mass, divorced parishioners and gay priests – misses the larger issue. The Catholic Church is a Eucharistic church, where celebration of the Mass is central, but the number of priests is insufficient to serve the faithful. The importing of priests from Africa and India is not sustainable, so Leo must act decisively (if quietly) to expand the ranks of the clergy. Allowing priests to marry, thereby ending the experiment in clerical celibacy that lasted nearly a thousand years, is the first and most logical step (perhaps rolled out gradually, beginning with remote areas like the Amazon, as Francis was apparently prepared to do). The second remedy, admitting women into the priesthood, is a longer-range solution, but as Tóibín points out, Leo is young by papal standards and practised in the art of building consensus.

Jeremy Harding writes that the Museum of West African Art ‘could be a permanent home for repatriated artefacts from Europe and the US’ (LRB, 5 June). Yet this cannot apply to the Benin bronzes, on the premise of housing which MOWAA raised substantial funds (reportedly $20 million) from the international funding bodies Harding mentions. Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments has built a dedicated storage facility for repatriated bronzes in Benin City and has signed an agreement with the Royal Palace to supervise their conservation and curation, although following the outgoing President Buhari’s decree of 23 March 2023 they remain the property of the Oba. This episode should teach international funding bodies that the path to restitution cannot bypass federal governments or traditional leadership for private ventures, with or without state government backing.

Robert Cioffi writes that Merer, ‘the star of the Red Sea Scrolls’, ‘dipped his reed pen in ink’ (LRB, 8 May). No. This was before split-nib reed pens and inkwells, in a time of rush brushes and palettes.