Domhnall

I obtained this huge collection in paperback and second hand; for all my care, towards the end it had begun to split from its binding and I have to ask if it is important enough for me to want a newer copy. The skill and technical quality of this poetry is beyond question; Day-Lewis’s poems are written in a huge range of styles and forms, and include many that imitate the style of other poets, successfully enough for critics to have complained at his lacking a voice of his own; a complaint that I find nonsensical. I supported my reading of the poems with a biography by Peter Stanford and with this help can readily pick out the autobiographical aspect of many poems, so in that respect I can accept the sincerity – or at least the self revelation – in at least some poems which we know did speak clearly to those who shared his life, sometimes to painful effect. The fact remains that only a small proportion of the poems make any strong impression for me and many seem to me, however unfairly, to be insincere, formal exercises, seemingly written at his well ordered desk during office hours as a professional assignment, a piece of craftwork.

 

Nevertheless, technical quality does sometimes result in lovely work. In the Pegasus volume, from 1957, there are a number of examples. The Gate is simply descriptive, based it seems on a picture of a disused gate:

 

In the foreground, clots of cream-white flowers (meadowsweet?
Guelder? Cow parsley?): a patch of green: then a gate
Dividing the green from a brown field, and beyond,
By steps of mustard and saffron pink, the distance
Climbs right-handed away
Up to the olive hilltop and the sky.
..... But those white flowers,
Craning their necks, putting their heads together
Like a crowd that holds itself back from surging forward,
Have their own point of balance – poised, it seems,
On the airy bring of whatever it is they await...

 

Arguably more impressive examples of poems in this volume written initially as technical challenges would be View From an Upper Window or the very well known Sheep Dog Trials in Hyde Park. I picked The Gate because I happen to be amused by the reference to cow parsley and its confusing range of names, which has associations in my own life. A similarly personal dynamic is behind my response (as a one-time boy soprano in a church choir) to a much more powerful poem, from his 1953 volume An Italian Visit, written in response to an artwork to which I have given a link because it seems essential:

https://www.bluffton.edu/homepages/facstaff/sullivanm/italy/florence/duomomuseo/cantoriadellarobbia.html

 

Singing Children: Lucia Della Robbia
(T.H.)

 

I see you, angels with choirboy faces,
Trilling it from the museum wall
As once, decani or cantoris,
You sang in a carved oak stall,
Nor deemed any final bar to such time honoured carolling
E’er could befall.

I too gave tongue in my piping youth-days,
Yea, took like a bird to crotchet and clef,
Antheming out with a will the Old Hundredth,
Salem, or Bunnett in F,
Unreckoning even as you if the Primal Sapience
Be deaf, stone deaf.

Many a matins cheerfully droned I
To the harmonium’s clacking wheeze.
Fidgeted much through prayer and sermon
While errant bumblebees
Drummed on the ivied window, veering my thoughts to
Alfresco glees.

But voices break – aye, and more than voices;
The heart for hymn tune and haytime goes.
Dear Duomo choristers, chirping for ever
In jaunty, angelic pose,
Would I had sung my last ere joy-throbs dwindled
Or wan faith froze!

 

C. Day-Lewis
[In the style of Thomas Hardy]

 

Many details in this poem mean something to me, even including “the harmonium’s clacking wheeze,” as I have in my childhood sat with my mother as she played an old church organ.

 

A key factor in my response to poetry is often to establish such personal associations, however arbitrary. I could call in my support some words of the poet, cited in the introduction (which is very well written by his last wife, Jill Balcon): “Cecil insisted that one must respond to a poem directly, spontaneously, positively – ‘to be able to enjoy before we can learn to discriminate’. He also said: ‘Modern poetry is every poem, whether written last year or five centuries ago, that has meaning for us still.’”

 

As an overall impression, I am much in awe of Day Lewis’s poetry but only a minority speak directly to me in a way that would make me wish to revisit them. There are poems that appear dry and inaccessible on first reading, only to suddenly emerge into sunlight on another occasion, and I readily accept that with more work I could hope to take far more delight in this collection, but I do assert that I have given his work more than a fair hearing already. In a world with so much other poetry to be explored, I fear that for me at least, Day-Lewis is destined now to rest undisturbed for the foreseeable future on my groaning shelves.

 

Singing Children, of course, has joined my personal list of immortals.

This is a relaxed and highly readable, chronological account of Day-Lewis’s life story. It not only provides an introduction to each of his books of poetry, placing them in their context both historically and biographically, but also employs the poetry on many occasions to illuminate Day-Lewis’s choices, thoughts and feelings, demonstrating their intensely autobiographical nature. At the same time, it is relatively concise and accessible, so it is not intimidating and certainly not overly academic. It is an ideal companion to read alongside his Collected Poems.

It is especially strong in its exploration of the sexual relationships that were clearly so important to his personal life and his poetry, though I am not so sure that the women are portrayed in meaningful detail as distinct personalities, rather than in their subordinate roles as his partners.

Day-Lewis was greatly influenced by other poets; his university associates are certainly discussed in some detail, but beyond that period I feel the coverage of these associations is very limited indeed. To take only a single example, while discussing Day-Lewis’s production of an autobiography, we read “Day Lewis’s friend, the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, was more vocal about his disappointment with the book. ‘Ah Cecil,’ he said, ‘you should have torn your heart out and left it bleeding on the page.’ “ [p276] How can such an interesting and seemingly provocative friendship fail to merit a decent paragraph of description? What a powerful and certainly very sharp observation about Day-Lewis’s personality. His mother died in his infancy, his father brought him up in rather an awkward way, he was a boarder at a public school, he was serially unfaithful to his partners and he struggled at first as a parent, hindered rather than helped by the “expert” advice of the times – it is just so obvious to my mind that the emotional consequences of this personal history must be hugely relevant to his writing; I do not think Stanford makes best use of this material, which surely sheds light on the limitations of his earlier writing and the nature of his later development. Kavanagh, of course, famously exploited to the full his own emotional history as material for his writing, and in this quote he goes straight to the heart of the matter; we are left to imagine how such an exchange came about and how Day-Lewis reacted; it is fascinating to imagine how two such different characters must have interacted.

It makes sense to read this book alongside the Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis. To be honest, I reached a point where I decided to stick with the biography to the end, before returning to pick up the poems, of which there are a great many. The earlier poetry is frequently very dense and unsatisfactory, for reasons that I think are illuminated by the biography, and indeed it is often the case that reading any poetry collection in its order of writing condemns the reader to a tough slog before reaching the more mature and successful material. Hopefully, though, I can now look forward to growing delight as I proceed to his later poetry.

Some quotes

In June of 1925 [Day-Lewis] used £12 out of a legacy that had come his way from a distant relative to persuade the same house to publish his first colume of poetry, Beechen Vigil... The 24 short poems show Day-Lewis’s work at this stage firmly in the Georgian style that dominated British poetry through the 1910s and early 1920s. It had emerged as a label when Rupert Brooke, just down from Cambridge, and Edward Marsh, a civil servant and amateur enthusiast for the arts, decided in 1911 to work together on a collection of modern poems to stir up public interest and alert the world to some exciting new poets. They were reacting in part against what they saw as Victorian stuffiness and romantic sentimentality in verse. ... There was no single outstanding figure among the Georgians. It could hardly be counted as an organized movement save that its main momentum was provided by the regular anthology of new writings which appeared in the years that followed. ... The First World War looed large as a shared theme, typically in lyrical evocations of beauty and nature as a reaction against the brutality and epic loss of life of the conflict. Included under its banner – though they would each have rejected the categorization of Goergian – were W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves and D.H. Lawrence. Georgian poetry was often defined by what was excluded. Thomas Hardy and A.E. Houseman were left out because they were too old to be considered new. Even Masefled was used sparingly on the grounds that he had already developed a reputation. Robert Frost and Ezra Pound – both initially signed up for inclusion in the first volume – were excluded because they were not British. T.S.Eliot also fell at the same obstacle, though the Modernism of the Waste Land, published in 1922, was to mark the end of the Georgian ascendancy. Of the 36 poets who appeared, none, with the possible exception of Lawrence, could be called Modernist. Among the most regular names were Walter de la Mare, Edward Thomas, Andrew Young, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. ... The Georgians... continued to attract a large following until the end of the 1920s, when their label had become almost a term of abuse. They were Day-Lewis’s point of departure as a published poet. He mixed their distinguishing features with a heavy dose of the language and romantic lushness of Yeats’s Celtic twilight. [pp56,7]

What gave Auden’s passion for poetry a particular identity was the overt connection he encouraged those around him to make between it and the political, economic and social situation of Britain at the time. As young undergraduates they were watching the post-war hedonism of Acton’s Oxford fading away. The decisive blow had been the General Strike of 1926 when they and many like them were roused from student introspection to take sides in what became for the country one of the defining battles of the decade. Both Day-Lewis and Auden had worked during the strike for the TUC... and had been disappointed by the collapse of the workers’ resistence to their employers and the Conservative government. Their involvement left its mark. [p69]

...Day-Lewis is transcending personal experiences and taking responsibility onto his own shoulders for the privations of the poor. There is a strong element of guilt in much of his output in this period at his comforts while witnessing others’ poverty – stronger that one sees, for example, in Auden at the time. What is clear and consistent, though, is his call for good men with new solutions to stand up and be counted... The hint of religious fervour and tendency to preach, learnt in childhood, reapplied to political ends, was a shared feature of Day-Lewis, Warner, MacNeice, all of whom had rejected the faith of their clergyman fathers and were seeking a creed to replace it. [pp101,2]

What gives the best of the period’s poetry its unmistakeable quality seems to be the way in which feelings of private and communal insecurity are fused together, so that the personal lyrical anguish informs the political statement. [p102]

‘The collection,’ he wrote, ‘expressed simply my thoughts and feelings during the nine months before the birth of my first child; the critics, almost to a man, took it for political allegory; the simple, personal meaning evaded them.’ [p104]

Six months later he wrote of his work in progress to Rex Warner ... ‘It’s all very well to say that one writes because one wants to make something, but it’s not as simple as that: when you have made a chair somebody can sit in it - & who is going to sit down on a piece of poetry in 1932 – a few bloody juveniles in Bloomsbury – they’d be better sitting on the floor.’ [p125]

The poet and critic, Al Alvarez, described Grigson as ‘mean-minded, malicious and not a very good poet.’ He added: ‘As Robert Frost once remarked, the trouble with poetry is that there is no money in it. It is all about reputation. And that can make people involved in it vicious and backbiting.’ [p134]

In years to come Noah and the Waters was the one piece of work from the 1930s that he tried hardest to forget... In 1936, its failure highlighted the gap that existed between reality and his wish to join the proletariat in a revolution that would transform their lives ... The review which stuck in his mind, however, was by Edwin Muir in the Spectator ... he was politically to the left and had previously expressed his admiration for Day-Lewis, Spender and their colleagues. However, he wrote in March 1936, Day Lewis, while ‘a man of talent’, had allowed in his new ‘Marxian’ work his gift for verse to ‘deteriorate. And ‘become facile and careless.’ His political attachments and his revolutionary aspirations were, Muir suggested, in danger of destroying Day-Lewis as a poet. ‘The choice was,’ Day-Lewis wrote after reading Muir’s verdict, ‘[between] being an amateurish political worker or trying to make myself a better poet.’ [pp 146,7]

Yet peace and contentment are not usually the subjects of memorable poetry. Instead Day-Lewis was drawn in this mature period to the everyday, whether witnessed or remembered. There remains in his poetry the essential lyricism that ahd been there from the start but, without the impetus of trauma in his life, it took on a more sober, occasionally dry and ironic, often detached tone. ... The influence of hardy was still central, though Poems 1943-1947 may be judged to have marked its high point. Indeed, influence can be a misleading word for it suggests that Day-Lewis was simply imitating a poet he had so admired from undergraduate days. Another way of seeing it was that, like Hardy, Day-Lewis was one of the heirs to an English tradition that sretched back to William Wordsworth and beyond of writing of the ordinary, commonplace things and investing them with a sense of wonder. ... Within such a tradition, Day-Lewis grew more assured and even experimental, for example shaping dialogue into verse. He became markedly less reactive to the poetic fashions of the moment in his writing, if not in his publishing career, even to the point of seeming old-fashioned. [p246]

In the Autumn of 1852 Day Lewis had returned ... to see works of art in Florence. He describes these in part five. As the artists involved had been inspired by others, he, as a poet, was acknowledging his own debts. Each was clearly acknowledged with initials at the start of the poem. There is Luca Della Robbia’s ‘Singing Children’ in the manner of Thomas Hardy, Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes’ (W.B.Yeats), Leonardo’s ‘Annunciation’ (Robert Frost), Piero di Cosimo’s ‘Perseus Rescuing Andromeda’ (W.H.Auden) and Verrocchio’s ‘Boy with Dolphin’ (Dylan Thomas). ... All critics were impressed by Day-Lewis’s skill in adopting with with but not malice his colleague’s voices but some went on to ask was Day-Lewis also revealing how imitative he was, how devoid of his own voice. ‘There should be no need to insist on Mr Day-Lewis’s technical accomplishment, his friend Raymond Mortimer wrote in a long review in the Sunday Times, it is so conspicuous... History shows that in Europe men have continually felt impelled to innovate in all the arts. Once in a way and individual artist refuses to march with the times, because the methods do not suit his genius.’ Mortimer’s view that Day-Lewis was not an innovator seemed to be confirmed by his detailing at some length what he saw as the influence of Robert Browning on An Italian visit. He concluded: ‘a good artist may be defined as a man who puts to good use the inventions made by other good artists.’ [p256]

The charge that he lacked his own voide because he was so drawn to the voices of others was one that Day-Lewis had already tackled in the preface to the Penguin Poets selection. There he had written: ‘If, like myself, he [ the poet] is a writer still more open to the influence of other poets, he will often find that he has more or less consciously used some other poet to mediate between his material and his imagination.’ Freely acknowledging his influences – listed as Yeats, Frost, Auden and Hardy, all featured in part five of An Italian Visit – Day-Lewis went on: ‘they suggested to me ways of saying what I had to say. Any poem thus influenced in not secondhand. I think it si possible that a reader with a sensitive ear, a dispassionate point of view and a thorough knowledge of the poetry of hardy, say, would find as much difference as similarity between a poem of mine, influenced by him, and one of Hardy’s own.’ [p257]

Music was another of the enthusiasms he shared with Balcon. Her first present to him had been a recording of Verdi’s Requiem, 20 sides of 78s which they had to take round to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s house to play because they did not have a gramophone. In the Summer of 1954 ... [pp267,8]

The extensive use of classical references in Pegasus highlighted the gap that was opening up between Day-Lewis’s poetic interests and those of a new generation of young poets emerging in the 1950s. The Movement poets, a term coined by J.D. Scott, the editor of the Spectator, to link Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, E.J. Enright, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn, were joined by, among other things, their dislike of classical allusions and anything too self-consciously poetic. They preferred plain, straightforward and often sardonic language and regarded the Day-Lewis / Auden / Spender generation with ‘derision’ as Davie wrote in ‘Remembering the Thirties.’ [pp271,2]

The round table where Day-Lewis wrote was usually neat and orderly. On it stood a sculpture of a nymph in printers’ lead ... which had been a present from Balcon. He kept a small book in which he would jot down phrases and words that had made an impact on him. His poems were written, amended and rewritten in longhand, sometimes in pencil, in cheap notebooks, often competing for space alongside parts of the latest Nicholas Blake he was working on. [pp273,4]

Stephen Spender liked to claim that Day-Lewis would kill off women he had once been in love with in his Nicholas Blake thrillers. Mary and Jane look alikes had already been murdered and, in The Deadly Joker in 1963, there is a hint of Hosain in the character of Vera Paston, chatelaine of the local big house who meets a brutal end. [p288]

In his lecture on ‘The Golden Bridle’ (after the restraint Bellerophon tried to place on Pegasus), Day-Lewis [told his audience] ‘Paul Valéry wrote somewhere... “Why do I use strict form? To prevent the poem from saying everything.” That is an extremely profound remark. A poetic form provides the poet with a system of checks and balances external to memories, thoughts and images, which an incipient poem catches and which – if not controlled – can run away with it. The form is a discipline which helps to select from an incoherent mass of material those data that are relevant to the poem’s still undecided purpose. But the form is not always merely selective and disciplinary: many poets have observed in their own work, as Valéry did, that the need for a rhyme in a certain place, or the exigency of a metre, has thrown up a revealing phrase, a creative idea, which might well not have come into existence without the prompting of a formal agency. Form, in a word, not only restrains but stimulates.’ ... He was all in favour, he said, of ‘innovative language’, ‘violent juxtapositions’ and ‘deliberate discords’ to achieve greater ‘complexity, intellectual toughness and irony’ – all aspirations of the poetry he had written while working closely with Auden and Spender – but he rejected the breaking of form in poems advocated by Modernism as potentially alienating readers. ... ‘We are so inured nowadays to accepting poetry as an art for the minority that it is difficult to put ourselves in the minds of people who knew it as a popular art.’ [p290]

The Orators was Auden’s second book, published in 1932 when he was still only starting out in his career as a poet. It occupies 93 pages in Faber’s 2015 edition, and readily justifies its standing as a separate volume. However, it is excluded from the Collected Poems not because of its length, but because Auden himself was dissatisfied with it, albeit it can be found instead in “The English Auden” –which includes many poems or versions of poems omitted from the Collected Poems. The thing is that I cannot see the reasoning for its exclusion, because I am approaching this work while reading Auden’s poems in date order, it is clearly a major step in his development as a writer, and whatever its limitations it is a significant piece of work with many attractive features. It would be absurd, to my mind, to omit this work from any serious attempt to follow his development. This is surely confirmed by the fact that Samuel Hynes, in his 1976 book “The Auden Generation,” devotes at least ten pages to a detailed discussion of The Orators, and draws from it a great deal that is interesting. At the time of reading Hynes, I went potty searching for this material in the Collected Poems, confused that it was supposedly not worth including there.

The Orators is not only lengthy but also technically diverse, switching from prose – itself varied, and incorporating quite a number of extensive lists - to various poetic styles and even incorporating some diagrams to illustrate his point at one stage. Just the physical architecture of the work is thus a source of fascination and entertainment. Auden’s use of language is also skilful and at times delightful, to the point that there is sufficient justification to spend time with this work even without having any clear grasp of what it is intended to mean or convey. In all honesty, his first publication was itself both obscure and dense; this one is in reality far more accessible. There are a number of poems or prose passages that would readily stand on their own, and be a pleasure to read for their own sake.

“There are some birds in these valleys
Who flutter round the careless
With intimate appeal,
By seeming kindness trained to snaring,
They feel no falseness

Under the spell completely
They circle can serenely,
And in the tricky light
The masked hill has a purer greenness.
Their flight looks fleeter.

But fowlers, O, like foxes,
Lie ambushed in the rushes.
Along the harmless tracks
The madman keeper crawls through brushwood,
Axe under cover.

...Alas, the signal given.
Fingers on trigger tighten.
The real unlucky dove
Must smarting fall away from brightness
Its love from living.”

It is not hard to see in this volume Auden’s debt to the legacy of TS Eliot’s Wasteland or Joyce’s Ulysses, and it is not really a handicap since he works so well with his material but it is also interesting to look for his efforts to break away from that and establish a different voice, bearing in mind the extent to which Auden himself would become a similar inspiration and obstacle for a later generation of English poets, such as Ted Hughes say, although also for his own generation.

"Life is many; in the pine a beam, very still; in the salmon an arrow leaping the ladder. The belly receives; the back rejects; the eye is an experiment of the will. Jelly fish is laziest, cares very little. Tapeworm is most ashamed; he used to be free. Fish is most selfish; snake is most envious, poisoned within; bird is most nervous; he is shot for his spirit. Eagle is proudest. Bull is stupidest..."

“The man shall love the work; the woman shall receive him as the divine representative; the child shall be born as the sign of the trust; the friend shall laugh at the joke apparently obscure... The leader shall be a fear; he shall protect from panic; the people shall reverence the carved stone under the oak-tree.”

The Orators has a coherent political theme, as an exploration of the ideas which were transforming his society at this time. Hynes concentrates on the continuing legacy of the First World War, the frothing battle of ideas from Left and Right across Europe and America in a period of economic crisis, and the emerging consensus that another world war might soon be in prospect. He notes the extent to which Auden draws on the privileged social lives of England’s wealthy elite, with their shared experiences of public school, their cars, their weekends out of town and their country house parties; this certainly grates on my nerves when I read it – notably in his satirical Address for a Prize Day.

I myself thought the poems also contained references, never very overt, to the role of these public school graduates in the administration of a vast empire and the physical coercion of its people. The prominence given to the airman, in particular, brought to my mind the role played by the RAF in the suppression of revolt or resistance in far flung peasant villages across the Middle East and Africa. I admit I become cynical when European or British politics is discussed without acknowledging this wider context. Americans might also have a rude awakening if they looked more critically at their country's foreign interventions under even the most "liberal" administrations.

The political analysis is not necessarily all that successful, but it is certainly not guilty of either simplifying the nature of society’s ills nor of glorifying the potential role of any emerging leader. There is a great deal of irony to be mastered before asserting anything definite here. It would be quite insane to attempt to read this work in the light of events as they developed after its publication. It is more interesting and surely more informative to take the work as a comment on the prevailing political debate and the prevailing sense of confusion, anxiety and fear. For a poet as much as any other public figure, it is hard to take a definite position on issues that are still only emerging from the fog of current affairs, with all sorts of possible futures yet to be pruned down by the course of events. What I do suspect is that the issues discussed in this work from 1932 are topical in 2019 for reasons that are not so hard to identify.

Whatever the experts say, I found The Orators fascinating and well worth investigating. I may return to it after reading more of Auden and his generation, to see if it survives greater scrutiny. However, I don’t feel required to see it as an object out of context, rather than a comment on both Auden’s development and also perhaps on the political evolution of his generation. Analogies with the politics of 2019 might also bear more exploration.

I have already read Damasio's 2003 book, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, and while it was interesting to read this book, published in 1994, it does not add to what the later book contained, the later book travels further and I preferred the more philosphical style of the more recent book. The strength of this particular book is its painstaking accumulation of evidence, which for some readers will be what they most desire, but for others will appear dry [though in fairness, his clinical case studies are fascinating and more than slightly disturbing]. I have long felt that Damasio's account of the embodied nature of our minds, his materialist account of human consciousness, is superior to any other that I have read, and for this I recommend going straight to Looking for Spinoza.

I have two volumes of poems by Jibanananda Das, translated by Joe Winter. Bengal the Beautiful is a collection of sonnets all concerned with the merits of Bengal, which I responded to very favourably; Naked Lonely Hand is more diverse in form and subject matter, selected from six collections and illustrating the range of Das’ work over his lifetime, so I feel justified in being more ambivalent. With both volumes, my initial response was often muted through cultural differences, major and minor, which become less problematic on second and subsequent readings, but never disappear. I would not claim to have any deep appreciation of them now; I can only give my personal response.

The first nine poems are taken from Bengal the Beautiful, which I have reviewed separately. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2527079355?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

Seven poems follow from a collection called Grey Manuscripts. In “Before Death” – eight stanzas of seven lines each, without rhyming structure – Das invokes a rather mournful style, repeating the phrase “We who have ...” as an almost religious incantation to introduce diverse recollections of past times in an idealised rural setting, in a way that implies he is addressing others of his own advanced age (though it seems unlikely that the poet was of any great age when writing this): We who have walked the lonely stubble field... We who have loved the long dark night of winter ... We who have seen the green leaf turning yellow ... The lengthy poem “Sensation” appears to describe an inner turmoil and the sense that the poet is different from those around him, which might concern his vocation to be a poet; it has a lot of nice lines and thoughts but I struggle to integrate them into a clear theme. “Lonely Signature” may be a love poem, in so far as I can decipher its evasive lines, though I find it inauthentic. “Song of Leisure,” by contrast, seems to me a far more effective celebration of rural life, solidly constructed around clear descriptive language:

At the call of the field of crops we too are here
Giving up sunlight’s day, abandoning earthly fame,
putting a match to city - port – factory – slum –
down to this field we came;
....
The farmer has turned earth over and gone –
his new ploughshare, fallen to the ground, stays on –
on the old field an old thirst stays alert;
the owl shouts out the hour for us in flight!

“At Camp” is a slightly chilling account of a hunt, with a “decoy doe” whose cries draw the unfortunate deer from hiding towards the hunters’ guns. “Field’s Story” is constructed from four linked poems and has an extraordinary quality of story telling, and is also partly reminiscent to my ear of the style of a lyric from the Blues: “Meadow moon keeps his gaze upon my face...” Finally, “Vultures” establishes the exotic aspect of this poetry for one who will never see that part of the world.

In the next set of poems, from Banalta Sen, I have not made sense of the first, referring to Suchenata, which may be a woman’s name or may be a term meaning loving awareness, but it is no love poem and no poem to love. I did like the colloquial expression in the brief poem “The harvest was some time back,” creating a whimsical effect that works well. The poem “Darkness,” on the other hand, seems very mystical and psychologically deep and vague to the point of meaningless:

I have been afraid,
I have suffered pain, endless, relentless;
I have seen the sun as it wakes in the blood-red sky
ordering me to stand and face the world in the guise of a human soldier;
all my heart was filled with hate – pain – wrath –
as if the sun-beleaguered world had opened a festival with the scream of millions of pigs.

“Beggar” is a brief and sad poem, glancing kindly at a moment in the day of a street beggar. Until recently, a reader in England would have responded to this as an alien experience not unlike th earlier poem about vultures, but under the neoliberal onslaught the streets of England are now lined with beggars for whom the elements are sadly less tolerable. “Banalata Sen”, the title poem for that collection, is apparently hugely popular and much quoted in West Bengal and in Bangladesh; it is fairly brief and, while it has nice lines, it is very opaque and surreal; of this specific poem, the translator writes: “Unfortunately for outsiders the atmosphere is a culture specific one, requiring a special knowledge (of what is conjured up by the various proper nouns) of a sort not to be supplied by explanatory notes.”

The fifteen poems of the Great Earth collection are diverse. “Sea Crane” is a long address to the graceful and impressive bird, so blithely unaware of human history and sadness. “Lightless” is a somewhat eccentric conversation with a star. “Naked Lonely Hand” is the title poem for this selection, but I do not see why; it is far too surreal for my taste. “Corpse” is again surreal and hard to interpret, except to enjoy the descriptive language. “Ah Kite” is a pretty little nature poem. “After Twenty Years” captures a couple meeting again after a long separation, without hinting at the outcome to follow. “Grass”, “Windy Night” and “Wild Geese” are again pretty nature poems.

“Sankhalama” reverts to magical language, something Das and presumably his intended readers enjoyed, but his next poem, “Cat,” is playful in a way that crosses any cultural boundary, I am sure:

All day on my way out I keep meeting a cat:
In tree shadow, in sun, on a rabble of brown leaves
.....
All day long it tracks the sun,
Now it’s to be seen,
Now – where’s it gone? ...

I was even more disconcerted by “The Hunt” than by the earlier “At Camp:” this time the fate of the deer is even more unfair.

Dawn;
After a night eluding the leopard’s grasp
...
He is down in the river’s cold sharp wave
...[to] astound doe after doe with his courage and comeliness...

Yes, it all ends badly for the deer and upsets me greatly, but I suspect the poet may be on the side of the hunter. Then again, I have no idea what the next poem is saying; in “One Day Eight Years Ago,” we get no clear explanation for the blunt opening:

They say he’s been taken away
to the corpse cutting room...

“Said the Ashwattha Tree” and “The First Gods” are pleasingly magical and that seems to be their point.

In a selection of seven poems from the next collection, The Darkness of Seven Stars, is a short and very naturalistic poem, “The Foxes That,” which I loved. “Seven Liner” is strange but includes an unexpected reference to Lewis Caroll’s Cheshire Cat, far from home: “like a cat that’s no more there, with a foolish grin, an empty slyness.”

“Geese,” “Sky-Fade” and “Horses” lead on to an entertaining diatribe against critics: “On His Throne” which begins:

‘Better write a poem yourself –‘
I said smiling sadly; the foggy lump made no reply;
No poet he, this fraud, droning on high
On his throne of manuscripts commentaries footnotes ink and pens –
....

Well, I read poems and do not write them, which gives poets an audience and a market on condition they please me, unlike “Sailor” and “Night” which both passed me by. “Idle Moment” however, is an entertaining, anecdotal poem about three beggars and a beggar-woman chatting, to whom the poet grants a pleasing measure of true humanity.

...Tipping some hydrant-pipe water into their tea
they set about to be more steady and serious
with their lives, sitting on the damp pavement
and shaking their heads ...

The last five poems are taken from “Time Bad Time Black Time.” After “She” and “A Strange Darkness,” the poem “Daughter” concerns a deceased child of the poet, uncomfortably. “World Light” is a meditation, and perhaps needs a guide to explain its intention. Then the lengthy final poem, “1946-47”, is on a different level to any other in this selection: more ambitious and more difficult. I have read it several times but would not claim to understand it properly as yet, but it is fascinating and that is good enough for now. For a writer who chose Bengal as his subject in so many poems, it must have been a major challenge to address the period of India’s partition, and this poem is without question philosophically rich.

...
In this age there’s a deal less light all around.
We have wrung out the value of this long-lived world,
of its words work pain errors vows and stories
made of the fineness of thought, and so we have stored up
sentences words language and an inimitable style of speech.
Yet if people’s language does not take light from the world of feelings
it is mere verbs, adjectives, a haphazard homeless skeleton of words
that stays well way from the verge of awareness...

Early in this novel, Baldwin devotes a few pages to a humorous comparison of the ways French, Swiss and Italian border guards behave: the French being rude and inefficient, the Swiss intensely serious, efficient and systematic, the Italians rather surprised that one had bothered to visit their country but delighted all the same and not remotely concerned about the rules. From this gentle piece of absurdism, he switches suddenly and brutally to the point: there was no border as sharp and dangerous as the demarcation between the Black and the White segments of an American town or city. So when Leo Proudhammer, a Black American born to a poor family in Harlem, takes it into his mind to become an actor, his brother is incredulous, until Leo makes the inspired observation that his prospects of success in any line of work available to him are precisely zero, and that is how American society is designed; however remote his prospects of success in acting, they are nevertheless better than nil by at least some marginal fraction. Of course we know from the opening pages of this story that Leo will in fact become famous and affluent as an actor, and towards the end he is exposed to the cynical assertion that his success proves that Black Americans are not excluded from the American Dream, they just need to stop being sorry for themselves and work hard. The novel replies to that false claim by illustrating just how vicious and oppressive White America’s racism really is and what intolerably unfair odds have been overcome by those rare cases of exceptional achievement

“Was there ever a better hour for gaiety? Who will sing us a song, a morning song, so sunny, so light, so full-fledged that it does not chase away the crickets but instead invites them to join in the singing and dancing?” [383]

The style of writing adopted by Nietzsche – although it appealed to him for other reasons too - was dictated by his atrociously poor and declining health, which made it impossible for him to read or write at any length, thus forcing his early retirement from academic life. [The widespread assumption that he had syphilis is just not founded on evidence and does not fit with his lifestyle at all; it is more likely he shared a genetic condition which killed his father.] He was always, however, a highly individual and unconventional thinker, producing work that was disliked by his academic colleagues, and claimed that it was really a liberation to be spared the drudgery of reading other people’s work, with all the restrictions and unwelcome discipline that entailed, and released instead to simply work out and present his own ideas in his own terms. His preferred working method was to take long, solitary walks in beautiful settings, thinking deeply on his chosen topics, jotting brief notes at the time or on his return home, and later compiling these into collections of very short essays, which were often only aphorisms; even this task often depended on the secretarial help of some selfless supporters. From a situation of constant pain and huge limitations he wrote lyrically of dancing and music and poetry.

The Gay Science is a very accessible and entertaining collection of short pieces, rapidly switching from topic to topic, including some that are whimsical and disjointed, yet building up a number of substantial arguments or propositions in the course of the whole volume. He was not writing for passive readers, and insisted that his readers must be actively engaged (not necessarily with reading his works, but with thinking for themselves / ourselves, though presumably in the light of his insights). He is easily compared to essay writing predecessors, not least Montaigne, but given the choice, his ideal format would surely have been a blog on the internet, with facilities for below the line comment and debate beneath every single piece; nobody could be better equipped for sharp banter. I am certain that he is prepared to set out some major arguments bluntly and without elaboration, in the expectation that any serious reader will be drawn by deep reflection to reach the intended conclusions without further guidance. I can only imagine his outrage in the face of 21st Century students, spoon fed in our institutions of higher learning, imagining that their costly fees entitle them to a diet of the bleeding obvious. While Nietzsche introduced or hinted at topics in this volume that he expanded on in later books, I still suggest that it is possible to arrive at the main points of his philosophy from the material in the Gay Science.

Certainly, the Gay Science contains many of Nietzsche’s greatest hits, in a world that loves to display aphorisms and wise sayings out of context; it is in these pages that we learn why we must love our fate and about the concept of eternal recurrence, this is where the madman tells us that we have murdered God, and there is a sense of achievement - at least delighted recognition - as we notch up each of these and other famous lines. But these clever notions, sitting so insouciantly alongside many playful witticisms [there are passages to make me laugh out loud] and not a few spiteful barbs, have a place and a context within an entirely serious discussion about the nature of values, morality, knowledge, truth and science. There is, for example, a perfectly cogent reason why he introduces the concept of the death of God, and it is to say that if we are to understand our system of values, then we need to find an external location from which to examine it, and that is the role we assigned to God for a long time; we cannot stand outside of our own value system in order to attempt an objective assessment because the desire to understand, the will to be truthful or to find the truth, the determination not to be deceived or the wish not to be a deceiver, all of these motivations rest on values and metaphysical assumptions which cannot be made part of a positivist model of science or of knowledge and why would we trust someone claiming otherwise; why indeed would we trust God to be otherwise?

There is a lot of excellent psychology in this volume. In passages arguing for the role of the passions in our reasoning and our belief systems, Nietzsche anticipates very well the way experimental psychology came to view things a century later, notably in the work of Kahnemann (Thinking Fast and Slow) or the writing of António R. Damásio (such as Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain). Nietzsche argues that we are typically disconcerted by anything that is really new, and work hard until we can subsume it under a familiar category of what we believed previously; in effect, knowledge is our way of digesting and destroying anything new, and who is to say that this is not the safest way to live – secure as a member of the herd? Nietzsche simply does not accept that people arrive at their beliefs by reasoning and modern evidence confirms this.

Nietzsche was naturally impressed by the emerging theories of evolution which were new in his time, including Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Spencer’s rather different theories of social evolution. He derides Spencer, but picks up from Darwin the suggestion that natural selection may be based on the most surprising attributes, to the extent that nothing whatsoever is trivial anymore: we cannot assume that wisdom, honesty, truth, good judgement are indeed the qualities that will bring success in the struggle to survive; maybe the fools will survive and prosper, while the thoughtful ones perish; maybe evil will win and virtue will be defeated; wishing it to be otherwise is not especially productive; in a world without the comforting delusion of God, these have become urgent questions and our very survival is at stake in their answers.

That, in the end, is one of the key lessons from this volume: nothing is trivial, all depends on what we do next. It is rather similar to the idea in Chaos Theory, that the flight of a butterfly in Brazil can change the weather in China. He writes: “The most dangerous point of view – What I do now or omit is as important for everything that is to come as the greatest event of the past; seen from this tremendous perspective, from that of their effects, all actions appear equally great and small.” [233]

This is certainly among the best biographies I have encountered. The subject, Frantz Fanon, was complex and challenging and he is not presented as an icon, but rather as an individual. This seemingly bland remark is worth unpacking. If Fanon is to be set up on a plinth as a model or as a paragon, then the flaws - both personal and theoretical – identified in this biography will topple any statues. Fortunately, the reality is far more impressive than the myths, of which Macey identifies and demolishes a large number.

Macey provides a very detailed, chronological account of Fanon’s life story: his childhood in the French colony of Martinique, his service in World War 2 as a French soldier, his training and professional practice in psychiatry, his engagement with the Algerian war of independence against the French, his contributions to Black African literature and culture, his political writings and his untimely death from Leukaemia at the age of only 36 years. It was a very full and eventful life and the story is told with style and a deep commitment to the truth.

A critical point emerging from this is that Fanon’s activities and writing were very much a product of his situation and his own lived experiences. For example, his work as a psychiatrist, in Algeria and Tunisia, was often experimental and innovative, and typically demanded energetic confrontation with outdated practices, but it was built on the foundations of his training and early experiences in France, was entirely in line with contemporary developments in the field of psychiatry in other countries, and was performed in collaboration with others of his profession.

Wrapped around this, a huge amount of wider history is described, most importantly a history of the Algerian War; reference to other liberation struggles (the Congo is one example) is patchy though interesting. The early history of France’s unprovoked invasion and colonisation from the 1830s onwards comes surprisingly late in the book, to be honest, it would have been helpful to unpick a little more detail when he observes that the French did seriously and explicitly consider emulating the USA’s genocide of Native Americans when they drove native Algerians from their lands and property and the book does not really engage sufficiently with the importance of Islam as a factor in the struggle for independence, despite a few useful asides, such as a discussion of the role of women. After all, the saga of French engagement with North African Islam is by no means resolved today, and even President Macron has been known to appeal without embarrassment to France’s “civilizing mission.”

Fanon’s writings are described at some length and subjected to very sharp scrutiny. Despite their huge impact, Macey is not overawed. He finds them poorly researched, factually unreliable, making unjustifiable generalisations from special cases, inconsistent and weakly argued. He points out that Fanon makes predictions that have demonstrably failed and often misunderstands what he has observed. He attributes these failings to the very constrained conditions in which they were written, which is especially so in the case of his most famous work, The Wretched of the Earth, written in a few short months while Fanon was dying of leukaemia. On the other hand, he is highly critical – even snortingly dismissive – of the way Fanon has been poorly translated into English, his writing often taken out of context, subject to selective reading as well as direct misrepresentation, and distorted in order to support other agendas. Macey argues that Fanon himself is sometimes idealized and his contributions exaggerated in ways that are just not supported by evidence.

What emerges from this critical biography is a more truthful, more three dimensional and in many ways far more admirable Frantz Fanon, generous, humane and incredibly energetic, willing to make commitments and willing to risk being wrong, who achieved a great deal in his short life and bequeathed a lasting legacy in his ideas and his values.

Quotes that follow are from the digital edition, whose page numbers differ a lot from the hard copy which I initially used.

One of the striking features of many of the tributes to Fanon that were published immediately after his death is the stress placed on his fundamental humanism. The negative emphasis on the theme of violence is probably a reflection of the American reception and of the way in which Fanon is read by Hannah Arendt in her book On Violence. She looks at Fanon’s influence on the violence that afflicted American university campuses in the 1960s, but fails to make any mention of Algeria[p51]

Outside France, the most familiar image of Fanon was for a long time that created in the United States, where Grove Press advertised Constance Farrington’s flawed translation of Les Damnés de la terre as ‘The handbook for a Negro Revolution that is changing the shape of the white world.’[p52]
... the self-identification of civil rights workers, black power activists and Québecois separatists with Fanon’s wretched of the earth necessarily involves the misrecognition of exaggeration. In the United States, civil rights workers did encounter terrible violence and the protests of the Black Panthers did meet with armed repression. But they were not faced with General Jacques Massu’s Tenth Parachute Division and the mercenaries of the Foreign Legion. When Fanon speaks of ‘violence’, he is speaking of the French army’s destruction of whole villages and of the FLN’s bombing of cafés, or in other words of total war and not of limited low-level conflict. The extreme violence of the Algerian war was, fortunately, not reproduced in the United States or Canada. [p54]

The new interest in Fanon’s first book is a product of the emergence of post-colonial studies as a distinct, if at times alarmingly ill-defined, discipline. [p55] ... Fanon is one of the very few non-Anglophones to be admitted to the post-colonial canon, and alarmingly few of the theorists involved realize – or admit – that they read him in very poor translations. The most obvious example of the problems posed by the translations is the title of the fifth chapter of Peau noire, masques blancs. Fanon’s ‘L’Expérience vécue de l’homme noir’ (‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’) becomes ‘The Fact of Blackness’. The mistranslation obliterates Fanon’s philosophical frame of reference, ... that experience is defined in situational terms and not by some trans-historical ‘fact’.[p56]

The ‘post-colonial Fanon’ is in many ways an inverted image of the ‘revolutionary Fanon’ of the 1960s. Third Worldist readings largely ignored the Fanon of Peau noire, masques blancs; post-colonial readings concentrate almost exclusively on that text ... The Third Worldist Fanon was an apocalyptic creature; the post-colonial Fanon worries about identity politics, and often about his own sexual identity, but he is no longer angry. His anger was a response to his experience of a black man in a world defined as white, but not to the ‘fact’ of his blackness. It was a response to the condition and situation of those he called the wretched of the earth. The wretched of the earth are still there, but not in the seminar rooms where the talk is of post-colonial theory. They came out on to the streets of Algiers in 1988, and the Algerian army shot them dead.[p58]

Recognizing that Fanon could be – and often was – wrong is part of what Henry Louis Gates Jr. has called ‘the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon’.[p59]

The classics of French phenomenology – Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and Sartre’s L’Etre et le néant – are obviously not treatises on racism and anti-racism, but they provided tools that were much better suited to the analysis of ‘the lived experience of the black man’ than either Marxism or psychoanalysis.[p178]

Nothing could prepare him for the most devastating experience of all. It occurred on a cold day in Lyon when Fanon encountered a child and his mother. This is possibly the most famous passage in Peau noire, masques blancs. The child said to his mother: ‘Look, a negro’ and then ‘Mum, look at the negro. I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’[p164]

The being-in-the-world that he had established for himself collapses into a being-for-others. Under the gaze of the child and its mother, Fanon now becomes ‘responsible for my body, responsible for my race, for my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze at myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics – and my eardrums were bursting with cannibalism, mental retardation, fetishism, racial taints, slave-traders and above all, above all, “Y a bon banania”.’ He feels nauseous. Nausea is, in Sartrean terms, an expression of shame: ‘Being ashamed of onself is a recognition that I am indeed the object the other is looking at. I can only be ashamed of my freedom to the extent that it escapes me in order to become a given object.[p226]

The final pages of Peau noire, entitled ‘By Way of Conclusion’, are a hymn to freedom in which Fanon rejects in very Sartrean terms all determinism and insists that his freedom is both absolute and self-founding to the extent that it transcends history. ‘Superiority? Inferiority? Why not quite simply try to touch the other, feel the other, reveal the other to me? Wasn’t my freedom given to me to build the world of the You?’ [p248]

The third edition of Antoine Porot’s dictionary of psychiatry, published by France’s leading academic publishing house in 1975, still contained entries by Henri Aubin on ‘North African Natives (psychopathology of)’, ‘Blacks (psychopathology of)’ and ‘Primitivism’. The former begins: ‘The primitive mentality must be evoked here, particularly as we are speaking of a less highly evolved ethnic group . . .’ It need scarcely be added that the same dictionary contains no entry on ‘White Europeans (psychopathology of)’. No one attempted to explain the massacres at Sétif and Kherrata in terms of the innate psychological traits of white settlers. [p297]

Fanon’s explanation of what was going on in Algeria is harsh and couched in staccato phrases in which one can both hear the voice of the man who could declaim passages from Césaire’s Cahier to such effect and that of the author of Peau noire: ‘I want my voice to be brutal, I do not want it to be beautiful, I do not want it to be pure. I want it to be completely strangled. I do not want my voice to enjoy this, for I am speaking of man and his rejection, of the day to day putrefaction of man, and of his appalling abdication.’ [p354]

...most fighters were illiterate and the wilaya produced their own propaganda material. Inside Algeria itself, radio was a much more effective propaganda medium than the written word. After 130 years of the French civilizing mission, the illiteracy rate was astonishingly high: in 1954, 86 per cent of Algerian men and 95 per cent of Algerian women could not read.[p421]... Colonization did not lay the foundations of Western society in Algeria. It created a divided and unevenly developed society, segregated along ethnic lines. ... As in Martinique (albeit it on a very different scale), Algeria’s ‘development’ was actually an underdevelopment. It could not be permitted to compete with France [p604]


Fanon had already rejected negritude as a ‘great black mirage’ in his 1955 article on ‘West Indians and Africans’, ... In Les Damnés de la terre, he returned to that topic in more detail. He now argued that the doubts about the existence of a universal black culture expressed by Richard Wright and others in Paris demonstrated that cultures always existed in national contexts, and that the problems faced by Wright or Langston Hughes were therefore not the same as those facing Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. In the underdeveloped countries, national culture meant the struggle for national liberation, not folklore or an abstract populism. Those who were still fighting in the name of Negro-African culture and organizing conferences dedicated to the unity of that culture should realize that they had all been reduced to comparing coins and sarcophagi. [p476]

Negritude could exist only in the context of white domination: blacks from Chicago and blacks from Nigeria or Tanganyika were the same only to the extent that they defined themselves in relation to whites. It was the dominant white culture that had described all the inhabitants of Africa as ‘negroes’ and the people of Algeria as ‘Arabs’ or ‘natives’. [p477]... Something had begun to change when ‘the negroes’ began to describe themselves as ‘Angolans’ or ‘Ghanaians’; as Amrouche had remarked in 1956, Algeria was beginning to be inhabited by ‘Algerians’ and not stateless ‘natives’. The theorists of negritude had, according to Fanon, failed to register that change. [p478]

Fanon speaks of a ‘nation born of the concerted action of the people’ but does not define that people in either religious or ethnic terms. In his remarkably generous discussion of the role and fate of Algeria’s European minority in L’An V de la révolution algérienne, Fanon is quite explicit about what he understands ‘Algerian’ to mean: any individual living in Algeria was a potential Algerian and could decide to be a citizen of the nation of the future. Fanon’s ‘nation’ is the dynamic creation of the action of the people, and his nationalism is a nationalism of the political will to be Algerian, not of ethnicity. And it is this nationalism of the will that allows him to speak in Sociologie d’une révolution and Les Damnés de la terre of ‘we Algerians’. [p491]... In practice, the Code of Nationality adopted in 1962 defined Algerian nationality in both ethnic and religious terms and made Islam the state religion, though it also specified that citizenship could be granted by decree to non-ethnic and non-Muslim ‘Algerians’. It was granted to only a tiny number of Europeans.[p492]

Fanon’s explosive text is actually made up of material dictated to his wife in the spring and summer of 1961, and supplemented by previously published and reworked material. The ‘Bible of Third Worldism’ was composed ‘in pitiful haste’ by a man who was dying but still trying to live up to the demands of a revolution.[p569]... Between April and the beginning of July, Fanon worked fast against the clock. The final text reflects the speed at which he worked. Little or no research was done. His impressions of what he had seen of the newly independent states of Africa merge into a nightmarish picture of colonial Algeria. Fanon’s hopes and fears for the future are expressed with powerful emotion, but he rarely justifies them with hard facts.[p570... The composite image of the ‘Third World’ that emerges from the book is in part a product of Fanon’s relatively limited experience, of the circumstances in which it was composed and of Fanon’s style of working. There is no indication of extensive or original research on his part [p589]


Sartre and Beauvoir got on well with Fanon, who could be seductively charming when he wished to be. To Beauvoir’s surprise, he proved to have a personal horror of violence. Although he justified the use of violence both on the public platform and in print, he was obviously deeply distressed when he spoke of the violence inflicted by the Belgians in the Congo and the Portuguese in Angola. More surprisingly, he displayed the same emotion when he spoke of the ‘counter-violence’ of the colonized and of the settling of scores that had taken place within the FLN... He thought, however, that his personal dislike of violence was a failing that reflected his position as ‘an intellectual’. [p578]

Fanon and violence’ is now such a spontaneous association in France that it trivializes what he is actually describing. [p594]... What, in reality, is this violence? . . . It is the colonized masses’ intuition that their liberation must come about, and can only come about, through force.’ In a sense, it is the term ‘violence’ itself that is so scandalous; had Fanon spoken of ‘armed struggle’, the book would have been much less contentious.[p595]... Critics like Daniel and Domenach suggest that Fanon’s theses on violence are an attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Hannah Arendt makes the same point and quite erroneously claims that he glorifies ‘violence for its own sake’. Fanon does not ‘glorify’ violence and in fact rarely describes it in any detail: there are no descriptions of what happens when a bomb explodes in a crowded café and when shards of glass slice into human flesh. The violence Fanon evokes is instrumental and he never dwells or gloats on its effects. In a sense, it is almost absurd to criticize Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. The ALN was fighting a war and armies are not normally called upon to justify their violence.[p595]... Nkrumah’s ‘positive action’ may not have appealed to him in either ideological or personal terms, but Fanon was well aware that Ghana had been decolonized without an armed struggle. He even suggests that France’s military involvement in Algeria meant that it could not fight colonial wars elsewhere and that peaceful decolonization was possible in West Africa. Fanon’s violence is primarily the violence of Algeria and its history. When he insists that a violent liberation struggle leads to a higher or purer form of independence, he is thinking of the future independence of Algeria. What he fails to recognize is that, in terms of the decolonization of ‘French’ Africa at least, Algeria was the exception and not the rule.[p596]

As Aimé Césaire remarked when he parted company with the PCF in 1956, it was obvious that ‘the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of people of colour against racism is much more complex – what am I saying? – of a completely different nature to the French worker’s struggle against French capitalism and can in no way be regarded as a part or fragment of that struggle.’ By 1961, there can have been few issues over which Fanon and Césaire were in agreement, but this was one of them.[p600]

It is, however, impossible to reconcile Fanon’s idealization of the peasantry with the reality of what happened to so many young people who fled into the countryside after the Battle of Algiers. They were killed by Amirouche and his men during the ‘blueitis’ episode. As a black outsider who was both intellectual and urbanized to his fingertips, Fanon himself would not have survived long in Amirouche’s company.[p606]

The fundamental ambiguity of Les Damnés de la terre is that, whilst Fanon constantly prophesies the victory of the people, the theoretical model he adopts necessarily implies that the group unity on which that victory is based cannot be sustained. In a sense, Fanon foresaw that the post-independence period would be difficult and dangerous; he could not foresee that it was a bureaucratized army that would hold the real power in an independent Algeria. And he did not live to see it do so. [p610]

This book gets two stars and I nearly always give five with my reviews. I picked up and read this book when my daughter accidentally left it behind on the kitchen table. Otherwise I would have read a cereal packet and might have been less irritated. The title alone is irritating.

Philip Roth writes very well. This book is laced through with set pieces covering pages at a time with quite beautiful descriptive writing, worth reading for their artistic merit alone. There is no mystery in the plot, which is announced on the cover, and the text routinely anticipates future events, and yet the plot does thicken and reach a peak of intensity towards the close; arguably, it is a tragedy in the Greek style, in which the fate of the characters is predestined and the characters are unable or unwilling to save themselves. The reader certainly becomes wrapped up in their fate as events unfold, which makes it a novel many will enjoy.

A character remarks in the novel: “Occasionally now, looking back, I think of my life as one long speech that I’ve been listening to. ... whatever the reason, the book of my life is a book of voices. When I ask myself how I arrive at where I am, the answer surprises me: “listening”.” [p222] Well, in this novel, one long speech is a fair assessment of its didactic style, lecturing the reader on anything and everything. It’s not always obvious how best to respond to this material, such as, say, the extensive commentary about Jews in America. What is the status of these sociological pronouncements? Of course the speeches are largely serving the plot but they have a life of their own, like a book of topical, though often whimsical, essays, as on the funeral of a canary or the rocks and minerals to be found in a zinc mine. All these diversions and interjections provide the rich web of circumstantial details that make the novel seem truthful and its story credible. The novel works hard to persuade the reader of its thesis. And it works to ensure that the author is identified with the side of virtue and integrity, in opposition to the ideological miasma which it purports to expose.

Although published in 1998, the story is set in the Forties and Fifties and it establishes a convincing sense of its time and place. It uses one family’s experiences to describe the human impact of the McCarthyite campaign to expose people in public life as Communists and to treat them as traitors, criminals and social pariahs. It argues that Republican politicians were abusing this process and wrecking innocent lives with the cynical objective of winning power and influence by generating fear in the electorate. Pivotal to this argument is the account of American Communists as numerically insignificant, politically ineffective and psychologically damaged, dupes of a Stalinist party line, ultimately bereft and desolate when Stalin’s crimes were exposed by Khrushchev.

In this account, McCarthyism was a moral failing, a betrayal of true American values in the pursuit of private greed and power. In time, democracy would prevail; the checks and balances of a benign constitution would grind slowly but surely to restore balance. There is, in other words, an essentially moral environment, created by the Constitution and its sainted Founding Fathers, which must in time prevail despite temporary aberrations.

“To lose your job and have the newspapers calling you a traitor – these are very unpleasant things. But it’s still not the situation that it is total, which is totalitarianism. I wasn’t put in jail and I wasn’t tortured. ... I could put up a legal fight. I had free movement, I could give interviews, raise money, hire a lawyer, make courtroom challenges. Which I did. Of course, you can become so depressed and miserable that you give yourself a heart attack. But you can find alternatives, which I also did.” [p14] This is one of several gravely dishonest accounts of American political freedoms, which might be contrasted for example with the writing of Angela Davis on the treatment of Black political activists in America. She also gives a very different interpretation of the importance of the Communist Party to the political development of African Americans.

The McCarthy era brought to the surface an aspect of America’s political and ideological structures that is not usually acknowledged so overtly or implemented so crudely. It was necessary to sanitize this for general consumption, to provide a narrative that would prevent serious scrutiny. An obvious way to sanitize McCarthyism has been to depict it as a moral failing, an aberration, and to appeal against it to the eternal verities of the Constitution. I find this dishonest.

The alternative would be to provoke critical examination of the logic of America’s Cold War ideology, and the construction of a vast military and economic apparatus on the back of it, with bases around the globe to supervise an economic and ideological empire. Without diminishing Stalin’s crimes, they were never particularly relevant; the Cold War was not instigated in response to them, but was already in full swing after the 1917 Revolution. After all, the apparent ending of the Cold War did not produce any reduction in US military spending, but rather an expansion both abroad (not least into Eastern Europe) and domestically (with the stunning expansion of an increasingly militarised security apparatus, for example to deal with spurious border protection policies).

Appeals to the Constitution should also be critically examined. The USA is indeed totalitarian in ways this novel fails to imagine. The constitution does not provide equal rights to ordinary citizens and the wealthy elite or their powerful corporations, nor provide effective control over the USA’s enormous foreign and military engagements; the USA has more prisoners and larger prison industries than any other nation on Earth and the intrusion of the security apparatus into domestic affairs has been steadily expanding.

Even the depiction of Republican politicians as greedy and immoral individuals seems to me a form of misdirection, avoiding serious examination of their political and ideological objectives, and missing the significance of their deployment of victimisation and the politics of fear. When this behaviour is found in a whole class of politicians, then it is just inadequate to account for it as aa personal moral flaw on the part of any individual.

While seeming to expose a terrible truth about American history, I fear that Roth’s book actually helps to falsify the history. Perhaps that is harsh. I have not read his other work. Then again, this book does not tempt me to do so.

Initially this seemed worth reading on the grounds that it is autobiographical, because I have been introduced to H.D. through her poems; her skills as a poet are reflected in the superb writing, which sustains interest regardless of plot, being beautiful, but it never seems to me to particularly address the origins of H.D.’s poetry; nor do I have great sympathy for the existential angst of a poor little rich girl, for the repeated snobbery of social class [is that the basis for Pound’s arrogant refinements of taste?] and the casual racism that scars so many American writers (the fish cannot see the water); instead it is an achievement in its own right as a novel, as an exercise in modernist writing, as an exercise in phenomenology, with the author’s own life as material more than as subject; I think it might be fruitful to place it alongside Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex [home of the semi-colon] as an existentialist work and, surely, a feminist one.

This translation, by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier, published in 2011, is the best of two available English translations from the original French and the alternative translation by H.M.Parshley in 1953 is a disgrace, which abridged, simplified and often mistranslated the original. It really does matter which one you read.

Despite its forbidding length, this book is broken into manageable chapters and because of the way each handles a separate topic, it is practical and I think desirable to pause between chapters and read something else (or even not read; that is possible I imagine). The style is accessible; the translators mock Beauvoir’s long sentences sprinkled with semi-colons but this soon becomes part of the author’s distinctive voice and is not an obstacle; in fact, I will try it out below.

For anyone who might want to compare this with Sartre’s long and unimaginably abstract Being and Nothingness, the Second Sex is lively and above all concrete rather than abstract. It does assume a knowledge of Sartre’s major concepts without explaining them, so it is worth checking out an introduction to Sartre if he is not already familiar [YouTube will probably be good enough for this]. More than this, The Second Sex is a masterly demonstration of Sartre's model of existentialism and the methods of phenomenology on which he relied, arising indeed from a profound contemplation of the author's own life. I suspect that it was not intended at the outset to be quite what it became - a magnificent exposition of feminist analysis - because it started life as a self analysis by a woman and from that rock solid, but profoundly simple foundation, from the observation that she was indeed a woman, all else flowed.

The original 1949 publication date has to be kept in mind when reading and assessing the evidence used; for example, in discussing the biology of reproduction a more recent review would have to incorporate much more about genetics; her powerful discussion of abortion could certainly be updated to consider more recent methods and issues but none of her examples of shameful cruelty to women and the utter hypocrisy of moral barriers to abortion would need any updating whatever.

Beauvoir starts by examining and rejecting the notion that women’s lot is a product of determinism or destiny. She argues persuasively that biology does not determine human sexual behaviour, because the significance of biology is conditional on the social context; it can be a help or a hindrance and humanity has the capacity to make the difference. Her key point is that we will never grasp women’s potential by relying on what they have achieved in the past, or what they achieve under contemporary conditions, because the biological data fails to establish a serious barrier to her surpassing those benchmarks under favourable future conditions. That said, she gives an unblinking account of puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth and menopause, alongside health hazards arising from their malfunctions, that contribute to a very concrete experience for women which is not shared by men and not appreciated by them either.

Turning to human psychology, Beauvoir concentrates on psychoanalysis, in which ambitious claims about female psychological development from infancy through to adulthood are not only unsupported by serious evidence, indeed by any evidence whatsoever, but also contaminated by social prejudice, male ignorance and pure self-indulgent fantasy. Actually, they are not ambitious claims – they are destructive and harmful. In this chapter I think she produces a lively critique of psychotherapy, with arguments that I suggest remain valid for anyone exploring the topic today; I really would like to take this material further. Therapists rely on their technique to claim objectivity, as they study process rather than content, but in reality this technique gives them excessive power in the relationship with clients and permits them to indulge in grandiose self delusions. On the more relevant business of understanding women’s psychology, I take into account that in 1949, experimental psychology had yet to produce the work on development, or even the methodologies for research, that would be essential to a serious examination of this topic. However, it seems to me a serious defect that Beauvoir relies throughout this book on a psychoanalytic model for all her discussions of human psychology, which is simply not tenable; there are a range of far better psychological approaches today. Even psychoanalysis itself has matured; one approach that might have enhanced her analysis is called Object Relations Theory, which does explore the idea that the infant needs to discover the boundary between self and others; that is just the thing for an existentialist.

She makes short shrift of Engels and associated “dialectical-materialist” accounts of sex differences, pointing out in particular that the classical economists’ concept of economic man is not valid for any account of humanity, male or female. She also implies that a Stalinist approach seems to aspire to transform everyone into good workers, which is not her notion of freedom; surely an example of her inspired contribution to debate. I think Marx would have agreed with her; Stalin’s economics was not socialism so much as state capitalism.

Sociobiologists love to construct pseudo-scientific theories that amazingly endorse reactionary social value systems on the basis of self-fulfilling just-so-stories about human evolution. Beauvoir is perfectly entitled to use such methods for her own argument, as she does with style. She concludes that the labour involved in reproduction in all its facets is essentially circular and repetitive – which makes it fundamentally uninteresting. Humanity surpasses these basic cycles when engaged in creative activities, including hunting and fighting, where the point she highlights is not killing but risking your own life and overcoming the challenges in the process. Women lose out on the opportunities to surpass their constraints and that is their existential problem; they have been tied down to repetitive cycles while men run free.

Several chapters review attitudes to women in classical (Greek and Roman), medieval and early modern Europe. Exceptional women keep appearing in the record, always battling against intolerable burdens and ultimately faced with a wall of male hostility which escalates as women rise to the challenge. The very existence of such extraordinary women is sufficient evidence to demolish claims that they inherently lack the capacity for self fulfilment. It is clear that men have long had an interest in maintaining female oppression, amply articulated in the written record, and I think it is more important to hammer in this brute fact of oppression than to obsess over arcane details of their possible source. The available explanations are important but not so crucial; another explanation will do if it turns out to explain the facts of oppression as well or better.

In the material reviewed here, the intensity of oppression is directly correlated with property claims; women do better when their [limited] freedoms are not seen as a barrier to property rights. Sex role differences are frequently trivial among the poor and the artisans; when private property prevails and private wealth accumulates, women become objectified as part of the property portfolio; for their own survival, women even internalise these requirements and accept their status as objects in a world where men are the active agents. This concept of being an object rather than a subject is, of course, pivotal to existentialism. These chapters offer a fine exercise in social and cultural history, clearly paving the way for even more ambitious revisionist histories by feminist writers in the future. Her review of the 19th Century, the intensified exploitation of women and children in the industrial revolution, their status in socialist and other political movements, and finally the emergence of campaigns for women’s civil rights and for the vote – in France, America, Britain, Russia and other countries is detailed and informative. As an example of the complexities in play, she describes the Catholic Church moving to support women’s votes in France against the opposition of socialists out of a shared belief that they would vote on socially conservative lines and accept leadership from their priests. The currents are indeed murky at all times. The topic is like fractals – at each level of detail, new insights emerge. Again, Beauvoir surely sets an agenda for a generation of feminist historians.

Two major themes are now addressed in a series of superbly written polemics. She first examines in turn the lives and experiences of [Western] women in infancy, childhood, adolescence, and their initiation into sexual activity, including a chapter on lesbianism. She looks at marriage, motherhood and the social lives of mature women with blistering honesty. Her discussion of contraceptiona nd abortion is absolutely topical today. She considers prostitutes, mistresses, and the social lives of older women. Ultimately, she argues that women’s lives must be understood not in terms of their nature but their social situations. She insists that women are condemned to three particular choices: to live as narcissists, as lovers or as religious mystics. She explores each of these categories and attributes them to the unsatisfactory situation of their lives.

Turning in the closing two chapters to her positive proposals for change is not exactly inspirational or hopeful. If anything, these chapters enable her to review and insist on the intolerable constraints limiting the lives of women, with interesting remarks for example on the scarcity of great women artists or writers, let alone scientists. It is worth reiterating that she published this book in 1949. She notes that attitudes were starting to shift in her time, but comments that giving women access to new economic or social freedoms is going to be hopelessly inadequate if this simply means that women are invited to work, create and socialise with abandon while at the same time retaining sole responsibility for the full range of domestic and childcare responsibilities. Indeed, she predicts that there will be women who would prefer to retain or revert to their traditional roles rather than take up such an unfair challenge. It would be possible to update her discussion by describing changes over the subsequent eight decades, but I am not convinced it would change the assessment. She was not wrong, about this or anything else that matters in this stunning masterpiece.

The woman’s body is one of the essential elements of the situation she occupies in this world. But her body is not enough to define her; it has a lived reality only as taken on by consciousness through actions and within a society... the question is, what humanity has made of the human female. [p48]

Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming; she has to be compared with man in her becoming; that is, her possibilities have to be defined; what skews the issues so much is that she is being reduced to what she was, to what she is today, while the question concerns her capacities; ... when one considers a being who is transcendence and surpassing, it is never possible to close the book. [pp45. 46]

"The myth of woman plays a significant role in literature; but what is its importance in everyday life? ... if the definition given is contradicted by the behaviour of real flesh-and-blood women, it is women who are wrong. It is said ... that women are not feminine." [p266]

In a Guardian review artical, 8 September 2018, Amit Chadhuri referred to Jibanananda Das as one of the most “wilfully underrated” poets of the last century, which is as good a provocation as any to find and read his work. Of course I have to read this in translation, and take it as I find it, but in this case that is no compromise.

Every poem in this collection is a sonnet, with some slight liberties, and each poem is presented as a single sentence, albeit usually fragmented into disjointed phrases; sometimes, to be fair, a full stop might be inserted without altering the flow. Some of the minor liberties with form can be accounted for by the fact that this collection was published posthumously, from a notebook that was certainly still work-in-progress. I also suspect that some of the repetitions that jar, overlaps between adjacent poems, and some of the less effective moments generally, also reflect the fact that the poems were not yet ready for publishing, and the poet possibly hoped to continue improving them. Beyond this, though, I see few grounds for apology or misplaced humility: they are relaxed and read with a natural flow that is not strained by the constraints of form, but rather display to best advantage the reasons why sonnets are so much loved; it just is a great way to write and to read poetry and Das has demonstrated the possibility of using sonnets in ways that are original and personal.

Like poets around the world, Das makes extensive use of local place names, culture, folklore and natural imagery, and in most poems the local flavour is enhanced by leaving in a few specific terms that are not translated, but listed in a helpful glossary at the end of the book. For some, like names of months which follow a different calendar to the English, translation would not be accurate; for some, like names of mythical figures, we need additional explanation (which the glossary supplies) to appreciate their significance; for some, like names of some birds or plants, it is just more attractive to use the local name and besides it probably fits the metre best that way. There is an obvious patriotic appeal to people for whom this is their local poet, and this was historically the case with Dal’s work. The primacy of local detail is possibly also important in post colonial contexts, as it was for Yeats or Walcott for example. However, the experience of writers globally has always been that their universal appeal is greater when they talk most intimately about their own, personal history and places. Far from alienating a foreign reader, such local details invite us to see things in the way local people see them – which is on the whole a welcoming sensation, a warm embrace – and to recognise that we are similar, while frankly we can also love difference.

Some of the nature observation is beautiful and simple; is there a hint of John Clare in this example?

A sparrow’s white egg lying broken in grass – the pity, the silence
of its surface I love – at some moment it broke – on the front it is all
stuck with dust and straw – I look forever at it, ...

He can evoke mood with skill:

In this dark air only beetles and dragonflies fly,;
Straws drop silently from a shalik’s [a small, brown bird] beak on the way;
Ah, softly it picks them back up from where they lay;
The dusk’s red vein sets homeward mild of eye,
A dove croons – the stars find peace in the silent sky; ...

Some of the poems may seem straightforwardly patriotic, even addressing Bengal as a person.

I have looked on the face of Bengal: nowhere else shall I go to see
The loveliness of the Earth;

However, the emotional reference does not seem boastful to me, but melancholic, referrring to the experience of a migrant, possibly moving to a city for employment and prospects but fondly recalling their origins in a rural village, and this experience is one that could be shared in nearly every detail by any Irish, Carribean or other migrant in Birmingham or New York as much as Calcutta:

... If ever I go
Upon the way of the world – dust and buses and trams
I shall see in plenty – and so many markets, slums,
Dank lanes, broken chillums and urns, yelled “damns”,
Blows exchanged, crossed eyes, rotten shrimps – too much to write down, I know –

He can often find sublime phrasing:

I have lived long on Earth, and many a tender theme
Of the sad secret heart I have learned as I have gone by
On the way of the world

Or even:

The human hurt on the way of the world is mine, I have fed
On laughter’s taste ...
... The world’s path is full of my scratches, a few tears I have let fall

I have to wonder is there a Bengali equivalent to Patrick Kavanagh to remind us that such dreamy affection for a remembered rural idyll does not account for the grim realities that drove so many of its people to migrate in order to survive. In fact, I don’t think that homesickness is invalidated by such reflections. But I think even that is part of the appeal in these poems; I argue with the poet because I have been caught up by his imagination; I cannot avoid becoming engaged.

Amit Chadhuri has made a good point: the poetry of Jibanananda Das deserves to be acknowledged and more widely read. I have already ordered another volume – Naked Lonely Hand.

Boland uses the first half of this collection to set out her thoughts on the nature of love, and the remaining poems display her mastery of diverse topics. She uses her Irish identity to good effect, as also her experience of migration, and it is always clear that the poet is a woman with things to say from that perspective; the collection as a whole has the air of a mature reflection over a life lived fully. Her poems are serious and often profound, her ideas are original and quite inspirational, her imagery is kaleidoscopic and she can tell fantastic stories in the most simple terms. She has a very accessible style: nothing is dry and many poems are light hearted. Most of all, her poetry is gobsmackingly effective. I am so delighted that I stumbled upon this beautiful collection.

This is only a small collection but somehow it seems to have within it nearly everything I hoped for. Walcott is such a confident, fluent poet. I can read his opening poem – The Lighthouse – across more than five full pages and only later notice the technique, especially his [near] rhyming of alternate lines, relaxed and unforced. He uses formal structure in diverse ways and for all I know he may strain and suffer to achieve his effects, but the effect is fluid and free. He seems to me to use different voices, and even to borrow a voice if required. I was brought up short, reading Stream, by the conviction that – to me - it sounds as Welsh as Dylan Thomas in its huge, breathless sentences and its sweep from contemporary politics to the almost ritual invoking of a Sixth Century Welsh bard. His poems have very diverse moods, too, from the blokey humour of The Lighthouse, meeting up for a boozy evening with an old pal, to the miserable shambles of an empty Brooklyn apartment in Winter Lamps, the cold and unattractive debris of a failed relationship. In the title poem he seethes with anger and truculence at the racism of the USA’s segregated South, whereas in The Light of the World he brings the warmest sentiments of appreciation and even love to his encounter with the ordinary people of St Lucia on a darkened bus in late evening, returning from a bustling market day. One of my favourite aspects of his writing is the way he can use the space of a poem to tell a story, to carry me along with him and show me unexpected wonders. But while he hints at travelling the globe, he becomes more irritable with distance from the beautiful West Indian islands, more humane and appealing when he returns and this is reflected in this collection. Indeed, in Tomorrow, Tomorrow, he is downbeat about travel:

A world’s outside the door, but how upsetting
to stand by your bags on a cold step as dawn
roses the brickwork and before you start regretting,
your taxi’s coming with one beep of its horn,
sidling to the kerb like a hearse – so you get in.

Sarah Bakewell has produced a very readable and effective introduction to the major personalities who produced the philosophical movement known as existentialism, with its roots in phenomenolgy. She offers quite a manageable account of their separate contributions and an explanation of their connections with each other, both social and philosophical. In doing so, she works to overcome a list of prejudices which I certainly bring to the topic, and I don’t think I am unusual in this. One reason she captures very nicely as follows: German welcomes monumental word constructions, but in English they tend to come out as long hyphenated lines, trundling along like mismatched railway carriages. [p61]

For Husserl, while she describes how he was displaced academically by Heidegger, she also suggests that in the long term he may in fact have been the more radical influence. She takes her evidence from the role of a keen phenomenologist, Havel, in Czechoslovakia’s liberation from the soviets, but by chance I encountered another strong argument for Husserl’s continuing relevance in a book about the mathematician, Godel. Her position regarding Heidegger’s association with the Nazis in the 1930s is unforgiving and she points out that, while it seemed to others that phenomenology and existentialism must surely be incompatible with tyranny, in Heidegger’s hands it was perfectly well adaptable to the Nazi cause.

She has a huge admiration and respect for the contributions of Merleau-Ponty, and while I have owned his Phenomenology of Perception since my student days, I must admit I am still very reluctant to attempt to read him again. A cast of other characters fill the pages, notably Camus, but inevitably two major figures dominate the entire book.

For Sartre, Bakewell offers an enthusiastic review of Being and Nothingness which I partly quote below, and this does make me want to give that book a try. She follows Sartre through a series of developments and changes in his complex career, and is especially unimpressed by his commitment to Stalin’s (highly distorted) approach to Marxism, even though she does offer a sensible explanation for it. She flatly rejects the attempt to bring Marxism and existentialism together – insisting they are incompatible.

Sartre influenced but was also hugely influenced by Simone de Beauvoir, and Bakewell leaves us in no doubt that Beauvoir stands perfectly well as a major philosopher in her own right. It becomes obvious that this association will merit a lot of further reading, now that we have been so favourably introduced. However, while Bakewell warmly recommends Beauvoir’s autobiography to this end, a massive obstacle is presented in relation to Beauvoir’s major contribution to existentialist philosophy, which is The Second Sex. It transpires that the English translation fell into the hands of a publisher under the impression this would be a book about sex, the obvious candidate to translate it was therefore a professor of Zoology and the obvious cover would be a picture of a naked woman. Large chunks of the text were edited out, including an entire chapter about women who have been neglected by history, while the technical language of existentialism was mangled beyond recognition, its meaning in the English version sometimes the exact opposite of Beauvoir’s intention. The same disgraceful mistranslation is still the one sold to English and American readers, and its huge popularity must therefore raise worrying questions as to what Anglo Saxon feminists actually imagine Beauvoir was trying to tell them. As Bakewell says: ‘Strangely, this never happened with Sartre’s books. No edition of Being and Nothingness ever featured a muscle-man on the cover wearing a waiter’s apron. Nor did Sartre’s translator Hazel Barnes simplify his terminology.’ [p217]

All told I suggest this is a fine account of the existentialist movement, well worth reading, and a book that will certainly motivate many readers to find out more.

Some quotes follow to give a flavour of the book.

In short, the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism (though she later moved away from it). She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rule. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves. [p31]

...the students around Heidegger knew they were privileged.... As Hannah Arendt summed it up: ‘Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak. ... There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.’ [p58]

American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James had explored human life as a practical, active affair, but they did not share Heidegger’s grand philosophical vision, and were more inclined to use pragmatism to bring philosophy down to earth rather than to remind it of its greatest tasks and questions. [p65]

Heidegger is philosophy’s great reverser. In Being and Time, it is everyday Being rather than the far reaches of cosmology or mathematics that is most ‘ontological’... We do not hover above the great rich tangle of the world, gazing down from on high. We are already in the world and involved in it – we are ‘thrown’ here. And ‘throwness’ must be our starting point. [p65]

For Husserl, therefore, cross-cultural encounters are generally good, because they stimulate people to self-questioning. He suspected that philosophy started in ancient Greece not, as Heidegger would imagine, because the Greeks had a deep, inward-looking relationship with their Being, but because they were a trading people (albeit sometimes a warlike one) who constantly came across alien-worlds of all kinds. [pp131,132]

Of Being and Nothingness: It seems extraordinary that a 665-page tome mainly about freedom should come out in the midst of an oppressive regime without raising an eyebrow among the censors, but that was what happened. Perhaps the title put them off closer inspection. That title was of course a nod to Heidegger’s Being and Time, which Being and Nothingness resembles in size and weight. (Its American reviewer William Barrett would describe the published version at nearly 700 pages as ‘a first draft for a good book of 300 pages.’) Still, it is a rich and mostly stimulating work. It combines Sartre’s readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel and Kierkegaard with a wealth of anecdotes and examples, often based on real life incidents involving Simone de Beauvoir, Olga Kosakiewicz and others. The mood of Paris in wartime haunts it, with mini-scenes set in bars and cafes, as well as in Parisian squares and gardens, and on the staircases of sleazy hotels. The atmosphere is often one of tension, desire or mistrust between people. Many key incidents could be scenes from a noir or nouvelle vogue film. [p152]

While the French press portrayed existentialists as rebellious youths with outrageous sex lives, Americans often saw them as pale, pessimistic souls, haunted by dread, despair and anxiety a la Kierkegaard. This image stuck. Even now, especially in the English speaking world, the word ‘existentialist’ brings to mind a noir figure staring into the bottom of an espresso cup, too depressed and anguished even to flick through the pages of a dog-eared L’être et la néant. [p173]

The late Heidegger is writing a form of poetry himself, although he continues to insist, as philosophers do, that this is how things are; it is not only a literary trick. Rereading him today, half of me says, ‘What nonsense!’ while the other half is re-enchanted. [p186]

Reading the late Heidegger requires a ‘letting go’ of one’s own usual critical ways of thinking. Many consider this an unacceptable demand from a philosopher, even though we are willing to do it for artists. [p188] Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked that he had seen Heidegger remain closed up in himself, seeming unhappy and unable to communicate at all until the other person came onto the way of thinking he had prepared.’ That is a severely limited basis for a conversation. [p189]

The Second Sex had an even greater impact in Britain and America than in France. It can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement. [p210]

Women’s everyday experiences and their Being-in-the-world diverged from men’s so early in life that few thought of them as being developmental at all; people assumed the differences to be ‘natural’ expressions of femininity. For Beauvoir, instead, they were myths of femininity – a term she adapted from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and which ultimately derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ way of digging out fallacies about culture and morality. In Beauvoir’s usage, a myth is something like Husserl’s notion of the encrusted theories which accumulate on phenomena, and which need scraping off in order to get to the ‘things themselves.’ After a broad-brush historical overview of myth and reality in the first half of the book, Beauvoir devoted the second half to relating a woman’s life from infancy on, showing how – as she said – ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.’ [p210]

The Second Sex was almost entirely occupied with the complex territory where free choice, biology and social and cultural factors meet... Our condition is to be ambiguous to the core, and our task is to learn to manage the movement and uncertainty in our existence, not to banish it... The ambiguous human condition means tirelessly trying to take control of things. We have to do two nearly impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophers tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment. Beauvoir’s brief sketch of these ideas in The Ethics of Ambiguity is one of the most interesting attempts I’ve read at describing the bizarre mixture of improbabilities that human beings are. [p226]

Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky – perhaps by a stork.[p232]

In his inaugural lecture at the College de France on 15 January 1953, published as in praise of philosophy, he [Merleau-Ponty] said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with what is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. ... Thus, he said: ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ ... We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. That is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point. [p241]

... for Camus, true rebellion does not mean reaching towards an ecstatic vision of a shining city on a hill. It means setting a limit on some very real present state of affairs that has become unacceptable... Rebellion is a reining in of tyranny. As rebels keep countering new tyrannies, a balance is created, a state of moderation that must be tirelessly renewed and maintained. [p257]

Sartre had called for a new existentialist psychotherapy and this was established by the 1950s, with therapists seeking to treat patients as individuals struggling with questions of meaning and choice rather than as mere sets of symptoms. The Swiss psychiatrists Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger developed ‘Daseinanalysis’, based on Heidegger’s ideas; later Sartre’s ideas became more influential in the US and Britain. Rollo May and Irvin Yalom worked in an overtly existentialist framework, and similar ideas guided ‘Antipsychiatrists’ such as R.D.Laing as well as the ‘logotherapist’ Viktor frankl, whose experience in a Nazi concentration camp had led him to conclude that the human need for meaning was almost as vital as that for food or sleep. [p282]

I do not think the existentialists offer some simple magic solution for the modern world. As individuals and philosophers, they were hopelessly flawed. Each one’s thought featured some major aspect that should make us uncomfortable. This is partly because they were complex and troubled beings, as most of us are. It is also because their ideas and lives were rooted in a dark, morally compromised century. The political turmoil and wild notions of their times marked them, just as our own twenty-first-century turmoil is now marking us. / But that is one reason why the existentialists demand rereading. They remind us that human existence is difficult and that people often behave appallingly, yet they show how great our possibilities are. They constantly repeat the questions about freedom nd being that we constantly try to forget... They are interesting thinkers, which I believe makes them worth our trouble. [p319]

Merleau-Ponty gave philosophy a new direction by taking its peripheral areas of study – the body, perception, childhood, sociality – and bringing them into the central position that they occupy in real life. If I had to choose an intellectual hero in this story, it would be Merleau-Ponty, the happy philosopher of things as they are. [p326]

When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief at the time... Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting but people are vastly more so. That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. [p326]

It's probably a good thing to have this on my shelves for reference, since Lowell has such a strong reputation, but as a reader I would prefer to have a much smaller selection, with adequate footnotes, produced by a good judge. Even one poem, if it was presented in terms I could appreciate, would be preferable to this monolith, but I could not suggest which one would serve. As it stands, the sheer hard labour of working through this huge collection has left few impressions that stand out or make me keen to return - just a grey and rocky mountain that I have climbed and can now tick off the list. Maybe a few years down the road I will come across him in a more favourable context and be glad to have this reference book in my collection. Maybe.