Letters

Colin Kidd, writing about Stefan Collini’s history of English studies in Britain, mentions that ‘Anglo-Saxon is still a compulsory element in the English curriculum at Oxford despite a campaign in the 1990s to abolish it’ (LRB, 14 August). In a short interview with Mary Bennett, principal of St Hilda’s College, at the end of my first term in 1970, I politely complained about the tedium of studying Anglo-Saxon and was politely put right: the correct expression was Old English, not Anglo-Saxon (this despite our set handbooks being Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader). I was also informed that the purpose of the Oxford English course was to prepare the one in twenty or so future Oxford English scholars with the comprehensive knowledge necessary for a career in teaching and research. I wonder how much has changed since those days – one of my tutors, Anne Elliott, told me that nothing of value had been written after 1830.

Colin Kidd notes the survival of compulsory Anglo-Saxon in the Oxford English syllabus. When I was an undergraduate at Manchester in the early 1970s, we had to study Old English, as it was called, for all three years of the honours course. This was at the insistence of the professor of English language, G.L. Brook, who had been appointed in 1945 and whose approach to the subject was exclusively philological. I once heard him complain that the publication of his edition of the Harley Lyrics had been held up for years because the publishers required some commentary on the literary value of the poems, and he couldn’t think of anything to say.

In his piece about Alan Garner, Adam Mars-Jones seems particularly interested in deducing the ages of Garner’s young characters (LRB, 10 July). ‘The children’s ages aren’t specified, though they’re old enough to be plied with cider by the Mossocks,’ he says of Colin and Susan in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. I have a friend from the English working class, like Alan Garner, who remembers approvingly that his parents liked to give him whisky as a young boy when he got on their nerves. Mars-Jones writes that Garner scholars know of ‘a draft in which Colin and Susan are identified as “ten-year-old twins”’, then remarks that ‘ten certainly seems too young.’ E.S. Turner’s Roads to Ruin (1950) has a chapter, ‘Beer for Bairns’, whose first paragraph ends with the sentence: ‘So far as this writer knows (though he may well be wrong) the last instance of a two-year-old child dying of cirrhosis of the liver was in Swansea in 1908.’

Next Mars-Jones declares that Nicholas, one of the siblings in Elidor, ‘must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding’. A plausible, if non-falsifiable, statement of Mars-Jones’s opinion. In The Owl Service, ‘Gwyn’s mother is threatening to make him work at the Co-op if he doesn’t do what she says, so he can’t be less than fifteen, the school-leaving age in 1969.’ Here Mars-Jones makes the questionable assumption that Garner was familiar with British child labour laws, but though it’s true that the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, as amended, defines a ‘child’ in England and Wales as someone not over compulsory school age, the Act as it existed in 1969 permitted ‘children’ to work any job at thirteen, and before that, to take on ‘light work’, which would have included ‘work at the Co-op’. Here is another of Garner’s seemingly infinite supply of ten-year-olds, kicking back with a shandy after a hard day’s work.

One more. ‘It must have been unusual as late as 1960 for a dairy farmer like Gowther Mossock to get about in a horse and cart.’ Rag-and-bone men with a horse and cart were a common enough feature of British life into the 1980s, and horses and carts were as ubiquitous in the rural England of 1960 as drunk pre-teens.

Josephine Quinn writes that the seaside, with its idea of the beach as a public amenity, was a British invention of the 18th century (LRB, 14 August). However, the Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens used the word rather earlier, in 1670, in a letter to the painter Peter Lely containing a short verse in English:

Towards the Sea-side ev’rie daij
Our People followeth this new waij
See what both Love and Art can doe.
Here the new Waij doth follow you.

Opening up the seaside had been a practical project for Huygens. In 1653 he proposed the construction of a grand avenue from The Hague to the coast at Scheveningen by which citizens might discover the delights of the dunes and beach. Scheveningseweg was realised a few years later without his involvement and remains a pleasant walk. To console himself, and to set the record straight, he wrote a long verse about his ‘zeestraat’ which became a bestseller in The Hague and largely persuaded people he had been responsible for the whole thing.

Huw Lemmey’s mention of the way jury nullification has affected Crown prosecutions of protesters reminds me of an occasion when jury nullification reared its beautiful head in courts martial when I was a Marine Corps judge advocate in the late 1970s (LRB, 24 July). At that time, the juror’s oath required that they follow the facts, law and their conscience. I referred to the oath in one of my early summations on behalf of a drill instructor who stood accused of a baloney charge of abusing recruits. As soon as the word ‘conscience’ passed my lips the judge interrupted me to tell the jury: ‘That’s what it says and that is not what you will do.’ The jury acquitted my client, quite possibly because the judge told them not to.

Jonathan Coe writes that Gustav Mahler’s influence, by comparison with Erik Satie’s, has been ‘non-existent’ (LRB, 14 August). Mahler’s influence, in fact, is hard to escape. His impact on Schoenberg (whom he helped financially), Berg and Webern was incalculable. Shostakovich (who was approached to complete his Tenth Symphony) and Britten were highly indebted, as were generations of American composers, especially Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. Mahler’s harmonic and gestural imprint underpins film scores from Erich Korngold to Hans Zimmer. Heck, even Beyoncé is part of it: she’s his eighth cousin, four times removed.

Jonathan Coe speculates about Erik Satie’s ‘British’ sense of humour, mentioning that his mother was English and comparing him to John Steed of The Avengers. In the course of transcribing seven of Satie’s piano pieces for guitar, I gathered some details about him that pull in a different direction. Erik Alfred Leslie Satie’s mother was Jane Leslie, born in London to Scottish parents; his maternal grandmother was from Aberdeenshire and his maternal grandfather was from Banffshire. I also learned that on one of the rare occasions he was paid a decent fee, he spent it on several identical corduroy suits.

Richard Seymour writes that when David Graeber left Yale in 2005, ‘he had no intention of going back’ to the academy (LRB, 14 August). In 2017, Graeber’s own account of what happened was published on the Public Anthropologist blog as a reflection on the ‘Academic Politics of Silencing’. There he recalls that after leaving Yale he made ‘well over twenty’ attempts to ‘land a job’ in the US. ‘I failed even once to even be considered for a job. Not only did I not make any shortlists, I failed to make any longlists. Not a single university asked me for my letters of recommendation.’

Seymour adds that Graeber was ‘lured back into teaching’. A report in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2013 titled ‘A Radical Anthropologist Finds Himself in Academic “Exile”’ corroborates Graeber’s own account. He resumed his teaching career in the UK only after a sustained effort to find a job at a university in the US.

Barbara Everett, discussing Horatio’s prayer that flights of angels sing Hamlet to his rest, reminds us that in addition to its usual meanings, ‘rest’ is also a musical term (LRB, 24 July). There is still further significance to the word. Horatio’s reference to angels recalls Hamlet’s exclamation when he sees the Ghost, ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us.’ It also recalls the Absolution in the Catholic burial service: ‘Jubeas eam a sanctis Angelis suscipi et ad patriam paradisi perduci’ (‘Bid your holy angels welcome and lead him [the soul of the deceased] to paradise’). Both were anathema to the Reformers. ‘To bestow peace and grace,’ Luther wrote in his Commentary on Galatians, ‘lies in the province of God, who alone can create these blessings. The angels cannot.’ And the word ‘rest’ (as a grace yet to be granted) is carefully avoided in the Service for the Burial of the Dead in the Prayer Book as implying the existence of Purgatory – anathema to the Reformers but a given (from time to time) in the mind of Hamlet.

But then everything in this play is from time to time. Moments before he prays for the repose of Hamlet’s soul, Horatio tries to take poison, declaring himself ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’, more a pagan than a Christian of any persuasion. And the dying Hamlet, also like an antique Roman, is more concerned about his postmortem reputation on earth than his destiny in the undiscovered country.

Thomas Jones gives an account of the death of Alfonso de Portago while racing in the Mille Miglia of 1957 (LRB, 14 August). I was a teenager at the time. About a year later, I was out walking with my girlfriend (now my wife) in my local village in North Yorkshire when we were caught in the rain. We sheltered in the eaves of a large garage, whose owner invited us to step inside. This was Keith Schellenberg, the Olympic bobsleigher and driver of Bentleys across deserts. Inside the garage was a beautiful racing car. Schellenberg explained that it belonged to Portago and he was charged with keeping it in good order until Portago’s son came of age.