Letters

Jon Day’s account of the tribulations of the rodents conscripted into Dr Calhoun’s behavioural experiments recalls the novelist and zoologist Maarten ’t Hart’s memoir, published in translation in Granta in 2004, which relates his atrocious experiences as rat wrangler on the set of Werner Herzog’s film Nosferatu the Vampyre (LRB, 24 July). Initially engaged to supply ten brown rats from his own laboratory for some brief shipboard scenes, ’t Hart soon found himself manoeuvred by the persuasive Herzog into a central role in the management of thirteen thousand white rats imported from Hungary to the set in Delft. After a three-day truck journey in overcrowded cages without food or water and a further day under the same conditions in a rented barn, only about eight thousand animals had survived, mainly by eating their companions. ’t Hart enlisted the help of two of his more resilient students to get the remainder suitably caged and fed, but further brutality awaited them as a result of the obvious unsuitability of their white coats for the representation of black plague rats. A trial hundred were immersed in boiling dye and perished immediately, before experiments at less lethal temperatures achieved a greyish colour. The disgruntled survivors immediately set about grooming themselves free of the dye, resulting in the pale beige rats of the finished film.

The Delft Municipality, understandably sceptical of Herzog’s assurances that no rats would be permitted to escape from the street locations, eventually called a halt. The shoot transferred to nearby Schiedam until it too had had enough, leaving a few remaining rat scenes to be completed in Hamburg, after which the rats, instinctively timid in open spaces and having only experienced captivity, were abandoned to the streets.

’t Hart’s account contains some inaccuracies about Nosferatu, which he misdescribes as set in the Middle Ages. Curiously, he writes that he witnessed the shooting of a scene in which Bruno Ganz, as the unfortunate estate agent Jonathan Harker, jumps in terror into the sea from the deck of Nosferatu’s commandeered plague ship. Herzog’s film, following F.W. Murnau’s original of 1922, doesn’t place Harker on the ship at all, but has him making a desperate overland journey on horseback in a fevered attempt to reach his fiancée in Wismar before Nosferatu can arrive by sea and plunge his rat-like fangs into her.

In Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog (2002), Herzog contradicts ’t Hart’s apocalyptic account of the rats’ suffering (though he doesn’t mention him by name), and insists that the majority of the original animals did not end up dead or lost; instead, the production ended up with five hundred more rats than it started with and he sold them all at the end of the shoot. To whom, and for what purpose, he omits to mention.

Mark Wonnacott writes that the introduction of ‘fair rents’ led to what a Tory Party pamphlet called the ‘Eclipse of the Private Landlord’ in the 1970s (Letters, 10 July). The story is longer and more complicated than that. Stringent rent controls and security of tenure in the private rental sector were first introduced in 1915 – when the sector accounted for about 90 per cent of all housing – because of the effects of the First World War. There was some lifting of rent controls in the interwar period, but they were fully reinstated at the start of the Second World War. The ‘fair rents’ introduced under the 1965 Rent Act were intended to be ‘fair’ to both landlords and tenants.

The introduction of rent controls, coupled with security of tenure, could have a very positive effect on the affordability of housing, while having little impact on the total supply. Most private landlords enter the market by buying existing property (much of it former council housing), not by investing in new houses. Rent controls will themselves improve affordability for tenants. If rent controls induce landlords to sell this will not alter the overall supply: it will provide stock for owner occupation (and purchase by local councils to house homeless families). This will tend to depress prices and make owner occupation more affordable.

Barbara Everett’s essay on Hamlet, which begins by considering the play’s first line, ‘Who’s there?’, brings to mind another scholar’s work on this topic (LRB, 24 July). I refer to Stephen Potter, author of One-Upmanship and founder of the Lifemanship Correspondence College. Potter enumerates for his students no fewer than nine possible strategies (‘ploys’) to analyse the line ‘Who keeps the gate here, ho!’ (Henry IV, Part Two). The first of these he calls the ‘Character Ploy’:

One of Shakespeare’s subtle touches. Note how even the request for a gate to be opened can reveal the impetuousness of the bluff speaker, the lordly peremptoriness of one accustomed to be obeyed … This play, full of warriors and their retainers, kings and lords, might be termed a study in the terminology of feudal modes of address. (Students are recommended to learn the above phrase by heart.)

LCC students were expected not to read the text in question. In this respect, Potter’s legacy stands firmly opposed to that modern scourge, the Large Language Model, which reads everything.

Huw Lemmey mounts a necessary defence of conscience at a time when dissent is increasingly conflated with criminality (LRB, 24 July). As the director of Action on Armed Violence, an organisation that documents the impact of explosive weapons on civilians, I welcome Lemmey’s reminder that non-violent resistance to militarism is not terrorism, but often a moral imperative. To challenge the manufacture of weapons used in alleged war crimes is not extremism. It is, in the tradition of Edward Burrough and the Peace Testimony, a refusal to let legality override justice. The state may proscribe movements, but it cannot outlaw conscience.

When I read Jonathan Meades’s description of the miseries of wartime internees, I think of my grandfather (LRB, 26 June). A Pole from Krakow, of Jewish heritage, he was on holiday in the UK when he was interned as an enemy alien in 1914. I have a photo of him leaning against a tree at a jaunty angle, smartly dressed, cigarette in hand. He made friends with musicians, joined a choir. There’s a manuscript book of folk tunes someone wrote out for him in a neat, professional hand. He married my grandmother, a London Jew, soon after the war, was a bon viveur, and did mysterious work for the Allies in the Second World War using the languages he had learned – English included – in a polyglot Europe.

Stephen Buranyi accepts the optimistic idea promulgated by Michel Brahic that prions can cause Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases (LRB, 24 July). I say optimistic because when it was discovered that the cause of BSE was a prion it was possible to introduce measures that led to the extinction of the disease it caused in humans, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. This is because the prion is infectious and spreads from individual to individual by transmission routes which can be blocked by public health measures. But the evidence that Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s can spread in this way is not there. So pessimism is in order, especially in light of the fact that scientific progress on these common diseases has been glacial in the quarter-century since my piece on BSE was published in the LRB of 14 December 2000.

Bee Wilson describes Al Pacino in Scarface as having an ‘overdone Cuban accent’ (LRB, 26 June). In fact his portrayal of Tony Montana was a racist caricature, and its consequences linger to this day. The film’s propaganda about Mariel Cuban refugees begins as early as the film’s pseudo-factual opening titles, which refer to Castro sending ‘the dregs of his jails’ to the United States.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was researching US immigration prisons, Cuban prisoners told me in interviews that the movie’s influence became part of the circular logic which allowed US immigration officials to keep them locked up for years as ‘administrative detainees’. They weren’t imagining this. In 1986, three years after the movie’s release, a former adviser to the New York senator Alfonse D’Amato wrote that the behaviour of Mariel Cubans was ‘so violent and unusual that Hollywood was inspired to produce a movie entitled Scarface, which portrayed the tremendously violent behaviour exhibited by these Cubans’.

Today the Trump administration relies on rhetoric about immigrant crime, uses tattoos as justification for incarceration and deportation, and repeats baseless claims that countries such as Venezuela are ‘emptying their prisons’ and ‘sending their worst’ to the US. All are intentional adaptations by Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest, of the old propaganda about Mariel Cubans exemplified by Scarface. Pacino, as he proudly says of the film in his memoir, ‘could live on the residuals … for life’.

Nigel Farage’s presence on TikTok is surprising and concerning for all the reasons William Davies describes (LRB, 26 June). Some of his success on the platform stems from a less well-known side hustle. Fans can pay for a personalised video message via the site Cameo, which has resulted in the circulation on TikTok of notorious clips of Farage reciting scripts containing references to online memes. No doubt this has increased his reach with a younger audience: populists succeed in the attention economy whether they’re the butt of the joke or not.

It’s hard to write the life of an academic, Stefan Collini thinks, especially one who never wrote an autobiography, like Christopher Hill (LRB, 22 May). Collini doesn’t mention God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, Hill’s still thrilling historical biography of Cromwell, published in 1970, which seems to me threaded with insights into Hill’s personal reckoning with revolutionary Marxism. Cromwell, who began with radical hopes and ended as a ‘constable’ of order, becomes a mirror for Hill’s own disillusionment. He talks of Cromwell ‘combining the roles of Robespierre and Napoleon, of Lenin and Stalin’. The counter-revolution is baked into the revolution, you can hear him sigh. The book was attacked, like so many of his works, in this case for its partial justification or whitewashing of Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland – though he would get a fairer reading today, now that a new generation of Irish historians has revisited events such as the Siege of Drogheda.

Those who fed the ‘flurry of British alarm’, as Jonathan Parry puts it, provoked by the Russian capture of Merv in 1884 – Merv was figured as a stepping stone leading to Herat – were dismissed by the former India secretary George Campbell as ‘Mervous’, and the jitters of the day’s leader-writers as ‘Mervousness’ (LRB, 17 April).