Letters

James Vincent describes the impact of strip-mining for phosphate on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru (LRB, 14 August). In the late 1980s, as Vincent notes, Nauru briefly became the richest country per capita in the world. But what also happened is that the Nauruans, with 80 per cent of their land devastated by mining, became almost wholly dependent on imported food (often from countries whose fields were fertilised with their phosphate). Severe obesity developed, and with it one of the world’s highest rates of type 2 diabetes.

Their main competitor for this unwanted title were the Akimel O’odham (Pima), indigenous to southern Arizona, whose traditional way of life depended on the waters of the Gila River, which they used to irrigate their crops. Successive damming of the river to provide water for the cities of Tuscon and Phoenix reduced flow in the Gila by nearly 90 per cent and traditional Akimel O’odham food production came to an end. Record levels of obesity and type 2 diabetes followed and by the 1970s cases of type 2 diabetes – until then a disease of middle-aged and older adults – began to emerge in children and adolescents.

Instead of paying attention to the environmental catastrophes underlying these population health disasters, researchers embarked on fruitless genetic studies looking to explain the apparently unique susceptibility of the Akimel O’odham and Nauruans to type 2 diabetes and the modern world (‘the thrifty genotype’). Alas, much of the modern world has now caught up, and type 2 diabetes in young people has become commonplace.

A footnote to this story is that exendin-4, a protein isolated from the venom of the Gila monster, a lizard of spiritual importance to the Akimel O’odham, was the molecular base from which today’s weight-loss drugs were developed.

Reviewing Zachary Leader’s book about Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of James Joyce, Seamus Perry gives a fine sense of Ellmann’s geniality, tenacity and biographical artistry (LRB, 11 September). In the early 1980s Ellmann was my doctoral supervisor. Having heard him lecture on several literary biographies, I asked him which he regarded as the greatest. Without hesitation he answered: ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson.’ Hearing the awe in his voice, I was pleased but a little surprised: he hadn’t mentioned Boswell in the lecture. When I asked why he was so sure, Ellmann pointed to the way Boswell built up his text out of so many minute vivid details, such as the precise manner in which Johnson moved his tongue against his gums.

I had at the time been reading Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Boswell attributed something of his own detail-amassing ‘Flemish picture’ style of biography to Adam Smith, who ‘in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles’. As is clear from his biography of Joyce, Ellmann, too, loved the kind of minutiae that enabled the biographer to develop a painstaking portrait in which, as Boswell puts it, ‘every little spark adds something to the general blaze.’ Leader points out that Ellmann was educated at Yale at a time when Frederick Pottle’s enthusiasm for Boswell was strong. Yet by the time the second edition of James Joyce was published in 1982, not everyone welcomed Ellmann’s style and method. In the 1980s one Oxford don denounced him to me as a ‘card-indexer’, and there were tensions between his American cultural co-ordinates (his ‘dialect’, as he sometimes put it) and some of the attitudes he encountered in Oxford.

In combining resonant detail with style, Ellmann’s biography of Joyce owes much to his American background and training. The book’s arresting first sentence – ‘We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries, to understand our interpreter’ – remains splendid. In retrospect, it also seems a Cold War sentence, presenting Joyce as the developer of a superior modern technology dauntingly far in advance of everyone else’s.

Seamus Perry says that Leopold Bloom’s tender care for his cat is ‘hardly Homeric’. Is it not? The difference is merely canine versus feline: Odysseus is almost betrayed back on Ithaca by Argos, his faithful dog, whose final breath is a whimper of recognition that almost gives his master away. Joyce chose the Odyssey as his model, surely, because Odysseus is the most human of heroes and the most heroic of humans.

Like the imperial state in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, Jackson Lears writes, ‘the US and Israel are convinced of their exalted status as Chosen Nations; their leaders are drunk on exceptionalist fantasies and committed to conquering populations they deem inferior’ (LRB, 24 July). In C.P. Cavafy’s poem of 1904 which gives Coetzee’s novel its title, the way the empire imagines such populations is exactly what enables it to constitute itself. Eventually, when the enemy fails to appear at the gates, uncertainty reigns: ‘And now what is to become of us without barbarians? Those people were a solution of a sort.’

Clair Wills writes about the trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon (LRB, 14 August). One theme consistent across the various accounts I have read, Wills’s included, is that Marten is too smart, too assertive and too outspoken to have been in a violent or coercive relationship with Gordon. Despite a judge’s ruling that Gordon caused Marten to fall from a first-floor window, rupturing her spleen, Wills says the narrative that Marten was Gordon’s victim is ‘difficult to square with the couple’s evident care for each other in the courtroom’.

I spent several years with a violent partner and have spent many more since trying to make sense of it. Never convinced by the platitude ‘it can happen to anyone,’ I have tried to take seriously my own accountability. I don’t mean that I think it was my fault. What I mean is, where was I in all of it? What made me stay? Or, better put, what made me want to stay? One thing I feel certain played a role is my stubbornness. Too stubborn to leave. Too stubborn to regret or retract my decisions. Too stubborn to admit I had a problem. A stubbornness I recognise in all these accounts of Marten.

Like Marten, I was the smart one, the educated one, the articulate one and the one with a reliable income. He needed me. He was physically stronger than me, yes. But in many ways I towered over him. And isn’t that intrinsic to the violence? His physical dominance of me in those instances was a recognition of his weakness, his insecurity and his desperation. Perhaps that’s why so many of us stay, because in the wake of a violent outburst, we feel pity. Perhaps we come to feel protective of the thing we need protecting from. Up until the point that I ended my relationship, I didn’t recognise myself as a victim of domestic violence because, like Marten, I simply did not fit the bill.

Benjamin Letzler has fun with the ubiquity of ‘drunk pre-teens’ in the work of Alan Garner and in past generations of the English working class generally (Letters, 11 September). In the early 1960s, my grandmother used to give us orange laced with gin when she was babysitting and Coronation Street was on TV. Nothing was going to distract her from the goings-on of Ena Sharples and Martha Longhurst.

Tony Wood assesses the contribution Mario Vargas Llosa’s five-day visit to the Soviet Union in 1968 might have made to his rightward political turn (LRB, 20 March). I was commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council to paint Vargas Llosa’s portrait when he visited Edinburgh in 1986 as the recipient of a Neil Gunn fellowship. While I was drawing he spoke fondly about his early years in Paris, where I was planning to relocate at the time. He had been quite closely acquainted with Sartre, whose writing he admired from a literary perspective. I was quite taken aback, though, when he described Sartre, with regard to politics, as ‘an outright cheat’. (‘Grand tricheur’ was the expression he used: he lapsed into French when his English faltered.) His point was that Sartre had succeeded in sanctifying his left-wing extremism by making his commitment a feature of his existentialist philosophy – a self-justifying ‘leap of faith’, which might just as easily have endorsed an inclination towards fascism.

I could identify with this view of Sartre. My own first visit to Paris, hitchhiking as a student, happened to fall in August 1968, only a day or two after the Soviet invasion of Prague. I had travelled from Germany, where the invasion had created a palpable sense of alarm, but the boulevards of the Left Bank were still festooned with banners and posters featuring Mao and Che Guevara, left over from the student-led uprising in May that year. Sartre had eventually condemned the invasion, but I remembered his being quite hesitant in doing so. Vargas Llosa agreed, and gave me to understand that these were precisely the contexts in which he had perceived Sartre’s tricherie.

David Smith remembers Keith Schellenberg as an ‘Olympic bobsleigher and driver of Bentleys across deserts’, who kindly let him and his girlfriend shelter from the rain and admire the racing car he was looking after (Letters, 11 September). Schellenberg is probably better known as an extremely unpopular laird of the Isle of Eigg. It was a strange purchase for a man who fancied himself as a racing driver: not much road, but a lot of mud, potholes, rocks, slow-moving sheep and cows and tractors (even now, non-residents aren’t allowed to bring cars to the island). He used to drive Eigg’s few miles of road in a 1927 Rolls-Royce Phantom, and was often compared, predictably enough, to Mr Toad: ‘Keith actually wears those round goggles and he’s always arriving in places with a lot of noise and clouds of dust.’

He bought the small Hebridean island in the mid-1970s and promised to bring prosperity through farming and tourism (according to his Times obituary, he intended this to demonstrate the ‘triumph of free enterprise’). But after divorcing his second wife he ran short of money, or at least of money to be spent on housing and employment for the islanders – the 39 who’d been there when he arrived and about the same number of incomers, many of whom came to work for his promised tourist attractions. He claimed later that the poor state of the houses on the island was deliberate: ‘I’ve kept its style slightly run-down – the Hebrides feel.’ His friends, meanwhile, were treated to ‘champers and hampers’ picnics on the beach, motorboat races and Hanoverian v. Jacobite war games; one German visitor was welcomed by a swastika hung from a balcony of the lodge built in the 1920s by an earlier laird, the shipping magnate Sir Walter Runciman. In 1994 Schellenberg’s Rolls-Royce was burned out in its shed on the pier. Unsurprisingly, the culprit was never discovered; he blamed the island’s ‘hippies and dropouts … rotten, dangerous and barmy revolutionaries … more interested in smoking pot than growing crops’. In 1997, a couple of years after Schellenberg eventually sold the island after a third divorce, it was bought by a trust controlled by the islanders. He’d left for good in 1995, shouting from the boat to those watching his departure: ‘You never understood me. I always wanted to be one of you.’