Letters

Seamus Perry writes about Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce, and the questions the biography and Joyce’s fiction raise about his work as ‘the life re-thought’ (LRB, 11 September). Perhaps Joyce’s simultaneous reliance on and indifference to factual memory had family roots. I was in the last cohort of children taught by Joyce’s sister Mary Gertrude (‘Poppie’) Joyce. Tiny, parchment-white, with pale and piercing eyes, rimless glasses and a hatchet face, Sister Gertrude seemed immensely ancient to the infant intake at Loreto College in Christchurch in the 1950s, an impression aided by the tiny black button boots she was still wearing decades after anyone else. She taught music and art, though the nuns at Loreto weren’t very interested in art. There were no classes in the subject all year, but in the last week of the third term there was, all the same, an art exam.

We were given sheets of paper, coloured pencils and a subject. ‘Draw your mother’s garden’ was the command one year. We were nine and ten. At first Sister Gertrude went up and down the rows quietly, as an invigilator should, but finally couldn’t resist criticising and correcting the works in progress. ‘Look at this! What would your poor mother say? Put some roses in at once, you idle boy.’

All round the room roses bloomed hastily, whether they existed in reality or not. That, we understood, was not the point.

Tom Stevenson gives a sharp account of the way President Nayib Bukele has concentrated power and curtailed civil liberties in El Salvador (LRB, 11 September). But the story of Bukele’s rule cannot properly be told without making clear its impact on women. El Salvador has one of the harshest anti-abortion laws in the world: a total ban with no exceptions, not even for rape, incest or to save a woman’s life. Under this law, women who suffer miscarriages or stillbirths are routinely accused of ‘aggravated homicide’ and imprisoned. Between 2000 and 2019, 181 women in El Salvador were prosecuted for obstetric emergencies – effectively, punished for pregnancy complications beyond their control. A dozen women are currently behind bars on similar charges.

There was some hope of change when Bukele rose to power in 2019. During the campaign he had supported permitting abortion when a woman’s life is at risk. Yet his tenure has seen a renewal of prosecutions in such cases. In 2022, a young woman known as ‘Esme’ became the first person in seven years to be convicted after an obstetric emergency: she was sentenced to thirty years in prison. The same year, a woman known as ‘Lesly’ received a fifty-year sentence – the maximum possible – after suffering obstetric complications when she was nineteen. Under international pressure, the administration did release a few women prisoners in late 2021, but this gesture was not accompanied by a legal change. The total abortion ban remains in place.

In 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held El Salvador responsible for the death of ‘Manuela’, a young mother who was jailed for murder after an obstetric emergency and later died from untreated cancer. The court ordered El Salvador to ensure that complications during pregnancy are treated as medical issues, not as crimes, and to reform its laws so that no more women are imprisoned in such circumstances. In 2024, in the case of ‘Beatriz’, the Inter-American Court found El Salvador guilty of denying a life-saving termination to a 22-year-old woman with a non-viable, high-risk pregnancy. Beatriz, who suffered from lupus, was forced by the state to endure a pregnancy that doctors warned could kill her. She survived, but the foetus died within hours of delivery – a needless outcome. The court ruled that El Salvador’s refusal to allow an abortion in such dire circumstances violated Beatriz’s rights to life, health and freedom from torture. These decisions, by the hemisphere’s highest human rights tribunal, underscore that El Salvador’s treatment of such women contravenes international human rights law.

Thomas Laqueur writes that the violin maker W.E. Hill & Sons was founded in 1762 (LRB, 9 October). The family can indeed trace its violin-making lineage back to that date, but the company itself was formed by William Ebsworth Hill in 1880. Elsewhere, Laqueur suggests that copies of Stradivari’s work came into being ‘largely due’ to the French luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who ‘created the modern Stradivarius standard models’. Vuillaume began working independently in Paris in 1823, but fine Stradivari copies were already being made there by his predecessor Nicolas Lupot, as well as by Giovanni Francesco Pressenda in Turin, and more to the point, by William Ebsworth Hill’s father, Henry Lockey Hill, in London. Henry Lockey began making copies of a Stradivari cello in the shop of his employer John Betts in 1810, and produced many other violins with shaded and patinated varnish in imitation of age. Betts himself advertised his own instruments for sale at his premises in the Royal Exchange in 1782 as being ‘in the ancient manner, after the patterns of Antonius Straduraus’. In fact, beautiful Stradivari copies were being made in London at least as early as 1717 by another fine luthier, Daniel Parker.

Thomas Laqueur tells the story of the 1711 ‘Mara’ Stradivarius cello immersed in the River Plate and its subsequent resurrection. Another near-death Strad tale concerns the violin known on account of its spectacular red varnish as the ‘Red Diamond’ (1732). In 1952 it was swept from the grasp of Sascha Jacobsen, leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, into the Pacific as he sought to save himself from a flash flood that engulfed his car on the coastal highway to Pacific Palisades. The violin was discovered in its case on the beach the next day, sadly fragmented. It was restored over several months by the luthier Hans Weisshaar, and the revitalised violin subsequently enjoyed a distinguished career. Like the ‘Mara’, its rebirth after watery trauma was said to have enhanced its qualities.

James Meek writes, perhaps a touch hopefully, of Nick Bostrom’s vision of a superintelligent and perfectly aligned artificial intelligence which, knowing the route to human flourishing better than humans themselves, dutifully shuts itself down (LRB, 9 October). One image of successful alignment currently favoured in Silicon Valley is rather more disquieting. According to the ‘worthy successor’ theory, sometimes called ‘benevolent AI anti-natalism’, an aligned AI would figure out that the most efficient way to minimise human suffering would be to eliminate humanity itself. According to tech’s ‘pro-extinctionist’ faction, whose ideology has been parroted by high-profile figures like Jeff Bezos, Ray Kurzweil and Peter Thiel, we should embrace this post-human future rather than fight it. If, as philosophical traditions from Buddhism to psychoanalysis have indicated, desire is the root of suffering, why not hand the reins of history over to a being that cannot desire, and go serenely to our deaths?

Having both edited and translated, with my colleague Ronald Waldron, the poems of the Pearl Manuscript, I found much of interest in Tom Johnson’s review of the recent book by Arthur Bahr (LRB, 25 September). It is true, as Johnson says, that the Pearl Manuscript contains the only surviving text of the four poems and that this is unusual for poems of such outstanding quality. It is, however, also significant that the text is littered with minor scribal errors: more than four hundred in the total of 6085 lines (or roughly one every fifteen lines). This indicates that the text as we have it must be at some remove from the author’s holograph, and suggests that several manuscripts once existed.

Given the numerous inaccuracies in the Pearl Manuscript, one must treat the debate about the missing line in Pearl with a good deal of care: plainly, it could simply have arisen from a scribal error. There is a parallel of sorts towards the end of Patience. Though the text of the poem tends to fall into four-line groupings, and is sometimes printed in quatrains, it comprises 531 lines – a figure which, obviously, does not divide by four. Scholars have offered various solutions to this minor crux: that it reflects a missing line, or that three deleted lines have been retained in error.

Comparing Patience and Cleanness with Pearl, Johnson oddly refers to them as ‘two much shorter poems’, where in fact Cleanness (1812 lines) is far longer than Pearl (1212 lines). He refers to Cleanness as a retelling of a biblical parable, ‘Belshazzar witnessing God’s “writing on the wall”’. But before we get to Belshazzar, the poet has reworked an astonishing range of stories: the parable of the wedding feast, the fall of Lucifer, the fall of Adam and Eve, the Flood, Abraham and Sarah, Lot and his family, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Nebuchadnezzar and the temple vessels. The skilful and confident handling of biblical texts suggests that the poet had undergone clerical training, and casts doubt on some of the attempts to identify him as a layman.

Concerning Tony Benn’s enthusiasm for electronic gadgets, mentioned by Andy Beckett, I recall as a boy in the late 1960s sitting in a recording studio at Heathrow Airport with my father, a civil servant who had just returned with Benn from an overseas mission (LRB, 25 September). Benn was in the studio to be interviewed. A BBC staffer tucked a microphone under his tie, for neatness. He was having none of it: ‘I am the minister for technology and I will display the mic for the interview.’

Yun Sheng writes that ‘the pay is good (sometimes twenty thousand yuan, or £2000 a day)’ for actors appearing in ‘vertical dramas’ for Chinese markets (LRB, 9 October). But this is very much the exception. A recent posting for a vertical drama filming in the UK wanted a lead actor with stunt and combat experience to do multiple fight scenes with only one day’s rehearsal and no stunt co-ordinator, all for significantly less than the Equity minimum wage. The production company was owned by ByteDance, the Chinese software titan, which you would think could afford to pay talent properly and organise the job safely. Needless to say, I didn’t take the role.

David Runciman, writing about the relationship between the UK and Europe since 1945, says a fair bit about that most interesting and intransigent of politicians, Enoch Powell (LRB, 9 October). My uncle spent a lot of time with Powell during the North Africa campaign in the Second World War. He told us that Powell’s preferred mode of transport was the motorcycle (typically, he was a trenchant opponent of compulsory helmet use in the 1973 parliamentary debate). On one occasion he was required to drive a truck. Coming into a bend caused by the presence of a sand dune, Powell did not turn the wheel but leaned his body and head into the bend, as a motorcyclist would. To his surprise, but nobody else’s, the truck chugged straight into the dune.