Letters

James Lasdun writes about the ‘astonishingly large number of serial killers’ at large in the Pacific Northwest in the second half of the 20th century, and its potential connection with industrial pollution in the region (LRB, 6 November). He makes particular mention of lead and copper smelting in Tacoma, Washington, which poisoned the air with a stink that, he says, came to be known as ‘the aroma of Tacoma’. Ted Bundy, we learn, ‘from the age of four … was breathing particulates from the Ruston smokestack across the bay from his home on Puget Sound’.

I am a native Tacoman whose father (not a serial killer) was born at home under the shadow of the Ruston smelter in 1916. The smelter was a blight and its toxic legacy continues, but Tacoma’s famous aroma had a different origin: it came from our paper pulp mill, combined with the expansive tide flats of Commencement Bay, which have been stinky since time immemorial.

Holly Case writes that Austrian politics is still sometimes compared to the ‘rum-soaked sponge filled with nougat and jam called Punschkrapferl: brown on the inside with a thin pink glaze’ (LRB, 20 November). It seems anachronistic to apply the metaphor to the Red Vienna of the early 1920s, before the Brownshirts were established; the image probably surfaced in the 1970s. Today, the Punschkrapferlkoalition refers predominantly, and confusingly, to the coalition of social democrats (SPÖ, red) and liberals (NEOS, pink) that governs Vienna. Most important, though, is the mention of nougat. In English the word refers to a chewy or crunchy sweet stuff that may or may not contain nuts, but in German it refers to a confection made from hazelnuts or almonds. Punschkrapferl, however, are nut-free and soft, made of Biskuitteig, ‘sponge cake material’.

Randall Kennedy discusses John Lewis’s rivalry with the more charismatic Julian Bond (LRB, 23 October). He doesn’t mention the event that introduced Bond to the wider nation: the raucous chanting of his name at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where he was the first African American to be nominated for vice president. (He declined, since he was several years younger than stipulated by the constitution.)

Kennedy speculates as to the reason Lewis won so much more of the white vote than Bond in the 1986 congressional primary run-off. One explanation he doesn’t mention is the lingering memory of Bond’s vocal opposition to the Vietnam War. Even twenty years later, this was Georgia after all.

Shaun Spiers is a bit unfair to Tony Benn when he accuses him of ‘splitting the Labour Party’ and believing that ‘there is no significant difference between a reformist Labour government and a right-wing Conservative government’ (Letters, 20 November). It was the ‘reformists’ of the Labour right who actually split the party, in 1981, by leaving to form the SDP – just as some of the right abandoned the party during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Benn, despite the urging of some left-wing allies, didn’t leave Labour when it moved in ideological directions he didn’t like.

He was also an energetic, if not always totally obedient, minister in four Labour governments which could reasonably be described as reformist. He then criticised right-wing Tory governments more consistently than many of Labour’s supposed realists, who believed Thatcherism was a harsh but necessary national corrective.

The presentation of Benn by his Labour critics as an impractical purist, while not always inaccurate, often says as much about their highly selective interpretation of the party’s role and history as it does about him.

Francis Gooding remarks that Harold Battiste recorded some great music at AFO, but no hits (LRB, 6 November). Well, there was Barbara George’s ‘I Know’, which topped the R&B charts and reached number three in the pop chart in 1961. And which I wouldn’t swap for Malcolm John Rebennack Jr’s entire oeuvre.

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite is forgivably incorrect in referring to ‘Gramsci’s phrase “the old is dying and the new has yet to be born”’ (LRB, 6 November). What Gramsci actually wrote is ‘the new cannot be born’ (‘il nuovo non può nascere’). This is a passage that people rewrite at will in published translations of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Sometimes the new ‘struggles to be born’, and in many versions the wordy second half of Gramsci’s passage (‘in this interregnum, morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’) becomes ‘now is the time of monsters.’

This dumbed-down, glammed-up version provided Slavoj Žižek with the title of his article from 2012, ‘Living in the Time of Monsters’, in which he wrote of a ‘well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci’ (‘attributed’ meaning he hadn’t bothered to look for a source). In 2015 there was a Twitter kerfuffle in which Žižek was accused of writing this version himself and of drawing from both Gramsci and Goebbels, though it seems more plausible that he liberally translated into English the memory of a liberal translation of Gramsci into Slovenian. And so it goes on. Earlier this year Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times that the monster quote is ‘a famous translation of a line from Antonio Gramsci’.

In the same issue, Rosemary Hill insists that Martin Parr, against the judgment of a schoolmaster who knew him, is ‘so obviously not lazy or inattentive’, even as she reviews his ‘as-told-to’ autobiography, a genre that is by definition the domain of the lazy and the inattentive. In keeping with this assessment, only one quotation from Parr in her review is inadvertently interesting, when he describes a black and white photograph of a child, a tricycle and mountains as ‘strange and compelling’. The cliché Parr is mangling is ‘strangely compelling’, a stock expression for something that takes hold of the imagination in an unexpected new way. Although I have not been able to trace this phrase to its source, it was familiar at least as early as 1991, when in an episode of The Simpsons (‘Homer v. Lisa and the Eighth Commandment’), Bart sells 50 cent tickets to his classmates to watch Broadcast Nudes on the Top Hat channel. ‘Gross!’ says one child (Milhouse), then another (Martin) adds: ‘Yet strangely compelling.’

Rosemary Hill says that Martin Parr, like Atkinson Grimshaw, ‘found his subjects in the streets of Liverpool’. While he did paint in Liverpool, Grimshaw is best known for moonlit scenes of his native Leeds, where an exhibition of these paintings recently opened at the city’s art gallery.

Owen Hatherley writes about the Dulwich Estate in South London and mentions that there is comparatively little terraced housing (LRB, 23 October). I live on the estate and have some experience of its approach to private and public housing. The Dulwich Estate is a charity, with fixed assets in the region of £380 million and an annual turnover of around £14 million. It supports local community development and affords educational opportunities, including bursaries to private schools. It also operates London’s only toll gate (£1.20 to pass through). Whatever the estate’s attitude to public housing, it ensures that private homeowners abide by its rules concerning what can and can’t be done to properties, including their street appearance. One of the reasons it gave to a neighbour of mine when refusing building permission for a modest first-floor extension (the estate’s decision is binding) was that it would give the road too much of a terraced appearance. However, it didn’t prevent a housing co-operative from building the row of red brick, semi-detached houses where we live, shortly after the Second World War. The co-operative included architects who were keen to test out their skills as bricklayers; wonky, sub-standard brickwork was the result, as our front wall attests.

Another public housing development on the Dulwich Estate was the Kingswood Estate, built by London County Council in the 1950s, a notable example of late brick modernism. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Kingswood is that a Grade 2 listed 19th-century mansion stands in the middle of it. Kingswood House was remodelled in the 1890s for John Lawson Johnston, who was the inventor of Bovril (the house is nicknamed ‘Bovril Castle’). It was the first big commission for Henry Vaughan Lanchester, who went on to build a number of large municipal buildings. Nikolaus Pevsner described the house as a ‘restrained version of Scottish baronial with a hint of early Renaissance’.

After the war, LCC used a compulsory purchase order to buy the house and its grounds from the Vestey family in order to build the Kingswood Estate. The Vesteys, who made their money in the meat and food industry, were one of the wealthiest families in Britain at the time. Ever since then, the house has been a building for public use; it currently runs a community arts programme. For many years the house had a small public library (it was opened by Peter Ustinov in 1956 and closed in 2020). The first time I visited it, around ten years ago, the only other user was a gentleman sat at a computer wearing a straw boater, bow tie and monocle, as if he were the ghost of a party guest from the time when the house was in private hands.

Aziz Huq describes the way politicians in the United States use their legislative authority to draw the boundaries of congressional districts to maximise gains for their parties (LRB, 23 October). State legislators, with some exceptions, are able to manipulate election returns to create electoral deserts in which one of the two major parties does not nominate a candidate. Both Democrats and Republicans engage in gerrymandering, and what’s more, they do it with no sense of shame. The effect is to weaken democracy, since it means less energy goes to party building and mobilising voters. It is one of the worst aspects of American exceptionalism.

By contrast, among the so-called Anglo-American democracies, four – the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – have developed institutions to arrange the drawing of electoral boundaries by non-partisan entities. They are charged to take into account many factors, but not the impact on political parties.

Nick Wray writes that the apparent regularity of mass extinction events (one every 26 million years or so) may be caused by increased impact rates as the solar system passes through the spiral arms of the Milky Way (Letters, 20 November). Another cause of mass extinction events is the occurrence of very large volcanic episodes known as flood basalts. An example of these is the Permian-Triassic event (about 252 million years ago), which is believed to have caused the extinction of 81 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of terrestrial vertebrates.