Not the least interesting section of Maria Scott’s closely argued piece on Baudelaire’s “Black Venus”, Jeanne Duval (Commentary, January 23), concerns her laying to rest of her initial “quibbles” concerning the recent Wikipedia assumption that Duval is the “Jeanne” who features in a carte de visite photograph by Nadar from 1862. My own “quibble” is fundamental: the “Jeanne” in both this photograph and a second one discovered by Professor Scott herself, and taken by Nadar on the same day, is not Duval at all. The clue is contained in the handwritten inscription (by person unknown) that appears on the second photograph: “Jeanne (Mlle)”, a conventional form of stage name adopted by Parisian actresses at the time. Virtually nothing is known about Mlle Jeanne, but she certainly appeared at the Bouffes-Parisiens as the second page in the original version of Jacques Offenbach’s Geneviève de Brabant (1859) and, it now seems, in other roles.
Scott rightly acknowledges that the strikingly different outfits in the two photographs are at odds with Duval’s impoverished state in 1862. They are, however, perfectly appropriate to the actress Mlle Jeanne. They are theatrical costumes and, aided by related attention to make-up and coiffure, may be seen to advertise the actress’s versatility. Further research might lead to identification of the roles. That two such different photographs should have been taken by Nadar on the same day need therefore no longer arouse surprise.
A blog of June 2019 by “Kurt of Gerolstein” (the music theatre historian Kurt Gänzl) mentions Mlle Jeanne as one of the actresses of the Bouffes whose images formed part of a collection he had come across in a photographer’s catalogue (kurtofgerolstein.blogspot. com/2019/06/ladies-of-bouffes-parisiens-1855-1860.html). Gänzl reproduces an undated photograph of her in a visually different role, not by Nadar this time, but by the establishment firm of Mayer et Pierson. It may also be viewed currently on French eBay. It bears on the reverse side the annotation “Jeanne (Bouffes)”.
Michael Tilby
Selwyn College, Cambridge
Maria Scott’s essay about a new photograph of Jeanne Duval prompts a mention of a draft play by Lawrence Durrell entitled “Black Honey”, begun in 1945, which he described to Anne Ridler (at that time his editor at Faber) as “a farcical piece of theatre”, and which is headed, in the typescript, “an historical farce”.
Apart from Angela Carter’s story “Black Venus” (1980) and Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The Salt Roads (2003), Durrell’s is possibly the only literary treatment of Baudelaire’s relationship with Duval. Two differing copies of the typescript exist: one is in the British Library; the other is in our archive, and is accessible on our website: durrelllibrarycorfu. wordpress.com/black-honey-c-1945.
Richard Pine
Durrell Library of Corfu
Eliot and Kipling
In his fine review of The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 10: 1942–1944 (January 23), Peter McDonald tells us that Eliot, replying to David Cecil’s comment about Rudyard Kipling’s “vulgarity”, said that he agreed about the vulgarity, “except that it seems to me to be something at such a deep level that the word ‘vulgarity’ itself hardly describes it”. This somewhat gnomic statement belies a real debt Eliot owed to Kipling. He edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, which included a substantial prefatory essay (1941), and the influence of Kipling’s “verse” can be detected throughout Eliot’s oeuvre. In the first volume of their magisterial edition of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (2015), Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue refer to more than fifty “borrowings” from Kipling in Eliot’s work. The most significant of these, to my mind, is to be found in line 25 of Part II of Little Gidding (“In the uncertain hour before the morning”), which clearly echoes Kipling’s “Even in that certain hour before the fall” in “The Fabulists” (a connection first pointed out by Grover Smith in Modern Language Notes, June 1950). This poem about the First World War is obviously in Eliot’s mind writing in the Second. Eliot had only recently published his selection when Little Gidding was published in 1942.
Eliot wrote that Kipling “knew something of the things which are underneath, and of the things which are beyond the frontier” (he had a “gift of second sight, transmitting messages from elsewhere”). This strange quality is also evident at the end of Little Gidding:
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
I think it is only a type of assumed intellectual or spiritual supremacy that includes Dante and Julian of Norwich in the Four Quartets, and excludes the “common touch” of Kipling. The poem itself is the finest riposte to David Cecil’s snobbery, and brings much clarity to Eliot’s vague reply.
Sam Milne
Claygate, Surrey
The Revolutionists
I think Ruth Evans is quite wrong in her characterization of Ulrike Meinhof as pursuing gender politics (Letters, January 23). The best-known West German terrorist of the 1970s, Meinhof was driven by a desire to unmask the many top officials in the postwar Federal Republic who had Nazi backgrounds. How she succumbed to violence, lost her family, forfeited her freedom and ultimately took her own life in prison is a tragic story that ought not to be distorted, and dehistoricized, by the values of later generations.
Lesley Chamberlain
London N6
Turner and Constable
Selby Whittingham is wrong to suggest that John Constable was ill at ease with the upper classes (Letters, January 23). Sir George Beaumont, one of the foremost aristocratic collectors of the day, was a lifelong friend. Constable also maintained warm friendships with Wilbraham Tollemache, 6th Earl of Dysart, and his sister Lady Louisa Manners, later Countess of Dysart. Constable’s dislike of Lord Byron – a feeling shared, incidentally, by many of the upper classes – seems to have stemmed from his somewhat prim nature. This trait was once wryly noted by Lady Dysart, who had invited the artist to spend the evening at Ham House. “We shall shock Mr Constable”, she remarked to another guest: “we are going to have a game of cards.”
Susan Owens
Debenham, Suffolk
Golden Age crime fiction
Reviewing books on “Golden Age” crime fiction (December 26), Nicola Upson alludes briefly to remarks by Dorothy L. Sayers on the ludic nature of such stories. In 1928, Sayers edited a remarkable anthology called Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, to which she contributed a lengthy introduction analysing the development of the mystery story, beginning: “The art of self-tormenting is an ancient one, with a long and honourable literary tradition”. She categorizes stories under many headings, and begins her collection with “The History of Bel”, from the Apocrypha, as an example of “Analysis of material evidence”, proceeding through “The Story of Rhampsinitus” from Herodotus (displaying “Psychological Method of Detection: Plot and Counterplot”) and thence to Poe and Conan Doyle, on through detectives who are “specialists” in chess, cards and railways, and a gamut of names long forgotten, such as Basil Thomson and Bechhofer Roberts. There was already a self-consciousness about crime fiction that even then was ripe for a doctorate.
Sayers has little time for women detectives, who, “on the whole, have not been very successful. In order to justify their choice of sex, they are obliged to be so irritatingly intuitive as to destroy [our] quiet enjoyment of the logical”. They have another detrimental effect: “One fettering convention, from which detective fiction is only very slowly freeing itself, is that of the ‘love interest’”, especially those detectives “who insist on fooling about after young women when they ought to be putting their minds to the job of detection”. Only two years later, Sayers introduced into her own novels the character of Harriet Vane, a young woman who is not only a capable detective herself, but so modern that she will cohabit with Lord Peter Wimsey before marrying him.
One peculiarity of detectives that begins early on is their bookishness. Holmes (in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery”) puts aside detection to discuss George Meredith. In post-Second World War policemen, literary affectation becomes almost the rule. P. D. James’s Inspector Dalgliesh is a respected poet. Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford cannot consider a witness statement without it prompting thoughts of the metaphysicals. Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse prefers music: Wagner is his thing. Nicolas Freeling’s Inspector Van der Valk, much more a man of the people, also adores classical music, but makes a point of scrutinizing a suspect’s bookshelves. Even Philip Marlowe is given to asides on T. S. Eliot. Why did crime writers do this? Was it to set the detectives a little apart, to suggest a deeper perceptiveness about human motivation – or merely to stop them seeming dull?
Jonathan Falla
Glenduckie, Fife
Childbirth
As a retired consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, I wholeheartedly agree with Leah Hazard’s comments, in reviewing Thread by Hannah Marsh (January 23), that the book “would have gained valuable nuance by including the more candid conversations with shop-floor midwives and middle-grade obstetricians – those most familiar with the clinical reality of maternity”.
On a busy labour ward (particularly if there are insufficient staff numbers) providing “woman-centred, personalized, individualized care” may frequently require an obstetrician or midwife who has been called to see a mother in labour to factor into her/his clinical decision-making not only the needs of this woman, but also the simultaneous needs of other women in adjoining rooms – and to prioritize. Clinical decisions cannot be made in isolation from their environment. Choice is a central pillar of clinical care; so too is safety.
Chris Fitzpatrick
Dublin
By any other name
In his review of several books on poetry, (January 23) Tristram Fane Saunders writes that in an interview, Andy Croft was asked “Would your authors be comfortable with seeing their poems published … under another poet’s name?” Apparently, Croft didn’t respond, but it reminded me of the postscript to a letter of December 24, 1896, from A. E. Housman to his brother Laurence, which said: “I was just licking the envelope, when I thought of the following venomed dart: I had far, far rather that people should attribute my verses to you than yours to me”.
Richard Malone
Dorking, Surrey
Empire Without End
Kojo Koram, in his review of Empire Without End by Imaobong D. Umoren (January 23), calls for the compulsory teaching of Britain’s colonial history; those who disagree “seem to fear that teaching this subject risks brainwashing the young into despising their own country, among other concerns”. The dismissive tone is misplaced. What he overlooks is that a positive account of British history has become harder to articulate in our day than a negative one. The story of constitutional monarchy giving rise to the first really liberal state is not as easily told as the story of our sins, which is also told throughout the media and entertainment industry. I have taught plenty of teenagers who do seem to despise their own country, and have never heard an engaging account of why they shouldn’t. It is wrong to imply that those seeking balance are bigots.
Theo Hobson
London NW10
Wittgenstein
In his review of Anthony Gottlieb’s biography of Wittgenstein (December 26), Nigel Warburton mentions the Adolf Loos-influenced house Wittgenstein designed with Paul Engelmann. But Engelmann withdrew from the project, more entranced with philosophy than building, handing it over to another Loos student, my great-uncle Jacques Groag. Jacques found Wittgenstein’s demands, such as raising the already built ceilings a quarter of an inch to achieve his vision of ideal proportions, and disregard of cost or difficulty, infuriating. “Dear Emo!”, he wrote to his brother, “I come home after a day of bitter quarrels, discussions, torments, totally exhausted with a headache, and that’s how it often is” (see Jacques and Jacqueline Groag, Architect and Designer: Two hidden figures of the Viennese modern movement by Ursula Prokop, translated by Jonee Tiedemann and Laura McGuire, 2019, p37). Perhaps they also disagreed in musical taste, as Jacques’s brother-in-law, Heinrich Jalowetz, was a student of Schoenberg’s who advocated for his works as a conductor in Europe and later at Black Mountain College in the US. Both geniuses, Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, needed others to bring their concepts and creations to the world.
Marc Aronson
Maplewood NJ
Square root
In Snezana Lawrence’s review of Paul Lockhart’s The Mending of Broken Bones (January 9), we read: “if you try to calculate, say, 2, you will only ever get a never-ending decimal”. This should read: “… say, the square root of 2 …”. I am sure the reviewer got this right; I suppose a square root sign was somehow lost during typesetting. The omission is obvious, but might mystify a non-mathematical reader. Incidentally, the square root of two has motivated investigation since antiquity because it is the length of the diagonal of a square with sides of length one.
Jonathan Jacky
Seattle WA
On Pedantry
If, as John Barnie says (Letters, January 23), the use of “data” in the singular is due to “the demise of teaching Latin in schools”, then the use of “spaghetti” in the singular must be due to the demise of teaching Italian. Moreover, the use of “ersatz” to mean “artificial” must result from the lack of German teaching, and the expression “the hoi polloi” from the lack of ancient Greek teaching. As for the genitive apostrophe “s” not being independent of the noun it qualifies, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were clearly at fault for using “his” as an independent genitive form after proper nouns, for example “Mars his sword” (Sonnet 55) and Sejanus His Fall, even though they both read Chaucer (according to a datum in Wikipedia).
Peter Bendall
Cambridge
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