26 Books

Trotsky has always intrigued me. He was an intellectual, a superb writer, but also a brutal proponent of terror, an ideologue and propagandist. Robert Service has written a trilogy of biographies of the major figures of the Russian revolution, of which this is the final part. His biographies of Lenin and Stalin were good and included a wealth of new information from the now opened Soviet archives.

Trotsky

Robert Service
Macmillan 2009, Hardcover, 624 pages, £25.00

Trotsky’s reputation in the West relies in large part on his own highly partial accounts of the revolution and his colleagues and antagonists. Various lefties have kept his flame if not burning, then at least smouldering these last 60 years or so, but no Troskyist government has ever attained power. This distortion in our understanding of such a key figure needed correction, so Service’s book is very welcome indeed.

It’s well known that Trotsky was expelled from the USSR as an enemy of the people and eventually murdered on Stalin’s orders, and this famous death has clouded his biography in a haze of pro- and anti-Stalin internecine strife.

Service shows how Trotsky constantly amended his own legend to suit the political situation. Prior to the October revolution, Trotsky had been in almost complete disagreement with Lenin on several occasions and for at least some of the time between 1905 and 1917 considered himself closer to the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks. This would, under Stalin, become a death sentence.

Trotsky was a man unto himself even after decisively joining the Bolsheviks and taking his place in Sovnarkom (i.e. a senior member of the Soviet government). His most famous role was as head of the Red Army during the Civil War that immediately followed Russia’s separate peace with the Central Powers. The brutality of the Civil War is notorious, but Trotsky seems to have won the respect of his troops. One oddity is that Service almost completely omits discussion of the famine that swept the USSR during and after the Civil War.

After Lenin’s illness and death, Trotsky was repeatedly outmanoeuvred by his rivals, now unleashed from their personal loyalty to Lenin. Service speculates that the core reason for Trotsky’s defeat was that he did not ultimately want the supreme leadership badly enough, and was not prepared to make the compromises – both physical and political – that an effective campaign would have required.

He belabours the point that Trotsky underestimated Stalin, who he thought of as an intellectual nullity. Stalin was many things, but he was not stupid, and was a far more effective politician than Trotsky. It’s a myth that Stalin was immediately vindictive towards his enemies; in fact it took almost ten years from Lenin’s death before the terror started, by which time Trotsky had been exiled for several years. Before his power was cemented, Stalin was constantly compromising and playing adversaries off against each other; playing politics, in other words.

Service finds a memorable phrase to sum up Trotsky’s inability to compromise or use the language that would have made his line more palatable to his colleagues: “He lacked the talent to manage his talent”, which could easily stand as his epitaph.

Somewhat against my expectations, the story becomes less interesting once it turns to Trotsky’s exile. His support in the Soviet Union was gradually snuffed out by a combination of executions and politicking, and his influence became almost non existent. Indeed he became the original un-person. Having lived for a time in Turkey, he passed through France and ended up, famously, in Mexico.

Here there’s a more exciting tale to tell – an affair with Frieda Kahlo, assassination attempts, and so forth – but by this time Trotsky’s involvement with the Russian revolution had completely ceased and not even his acolytes believed in some kind of glorious comeback.

It’s difficult to see an alternative history of the Soviet Union under Trotsky’s leadership, but especially to see how it would not have been brutal. Of course it’s unlikely that its brutality would have matched the almost unbelievable proportions of the Stalinist terror, but Trotsky was, above all else, utterly ruthless, and was in full agreement with Lenin’s ideas on the use of state terror. But what use are speculations on alternative histories?

This is a decent biography of a fascinating subject, but it never quite fires into life. Service’s prose is solid if uninspired, and this is constantly brought to the reader’s attention when the author praises Trotsky’s own exuberant prose style. Service’s writing is plagued with tics, which become wearing very quickly. One of these is to refer to Trotsky’s opponents following Lenin’s death as the ‘ascendant party leadership’, which is a technical term used by historians in this field, but it quickly becomes annoying as it is repeated time after time.

Nevertheless, this is an important addition to the literature on the endlessly fascinating subject of the Russian revolution, and one of its most important proponents.

The File is Timothy Garton Ash’s attempt to understand how the Stasi worked, through examining the file that they kept on him. He goes back to the now unified Berlin to talk with the people who informed on him, as well as those who were exposed to Stasi interference in their lives thanks to their contact with him.

The File

Timothy Garton Ash
Atlantic Books 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

While The File is a good read, it never reaches the level of insight of Anna Funder’s superb Stasiland. It’s a bit too self-regarding, and far too easy on our own security services, who Garton Ash always gives the benefit of the doubt.

I think it misses the mark because the Stasi’s offense against Garton Ash was comparatively piffling. They followed him – and he was a foreign journalist, after all – and got people to tell them what he was doing, which was not much. In the end he was banned from East Germany, and so the narrative is curiously incomplete: it ceases to be a personal account of East Germany well before the Wall fell. And, while there is personal betrayal here, it’s not on the scale that Funder uncovers.

Given that it’s now 20 years since the Wall came down, there’s an increased interest in matters East German, hence the retread for The File. But if you’re going to read up about what life under the Stasi was really like, choose Stasiland rather than this.

Captain Robert FitzRoy is one of those interesting, but marginal, figures in history that you might well have heard of but can’t put your finger on. Harry Thompson clearly hopes that he can change that by writing this, a fictionalised account of FitzRoy’s voyage on the Beagle (he was captain, Charles Darwin the ship’s naturalist) but I’m not sure he really does him any favours.

This Thing of Darkness

Harry Thompson
Headline Review 2005, Hardcover, 640 pages, £12.99

FitzRoy was clearly mentally ill and unprepared for the stress of being years away from home having been given impossible tasks and inadequate equipment. He was depressed, delusional and unstable. His enormous achievements in mapping, navigation and weather prediction are testament to his ability and itelligence, but not necessarily to his suitability to command.

Darwin is an important but somewhat marginal figure in this book. It’s FitzRoy’s story, and rather a tragic one. His multiple careers all end in failure, his circumstances diminishing with every new disappointment. Thompson puts the blame in lots of hands, rarely FitzRoy’s, and turns him into a victim as he does it.

His maps are scorned by the Admiralty, he is passed over for appointments, his political career is ruined by spite, his governorship of New Zealand wrecked by vested interests. Throughout, he is a liberal, conscientious, reforming good man, set upon by a wicked world. No doubt that was the case, but it’s laboured until I lost patience and started resenting him.

It might be the fault of the length of the book. At 750 pages it’s far too long and in desperate need of a good editor. The writing is fine, there’s just so much of it and it’s so clearly biased it becomes wearing. Of course a historical novel has no obligation to be objective, but surely he must have had a few faults beyond disagreeing with Darwin?

I’ll come out and say it straight away: Barack Obama’s election was the most exciting political event event I’ve ever witnessed. Here is a very intelligent black man who genuinely wants to do what’s best for the American people being made president after the eight years of corruption and idiocy from the Bush White House that has driven the world economy into disaster and sent thousands of people off to die in indefensible wars. Thank God.

Dreams from My Father

Obama Barack
Broadway Books 2004, Paperback, 464 pages, £14.95

There was little word of actual policy during his campaign so I read this book, some time ago no, to try to get an idea of what he’d done before. This is not the book to read if that’s what you’re looking for.

Written when Obama was still at Harvard, this is a memoir of a boy, confused about his background because he’s a different colour to his grandparents and his mother, who he lives with, trying to decide what to do with his life. He lives in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, going from a young boy to a young man in the process. He’s influenced more by his grandparents and stepfather than his mother, who seems to be a fairly distant figure. He contrasts the culture in America and Indonesia, then again in Kenya when he goes to meet his birth father’s family, and tries to find his own place within each one.

For the most part it’s very well written. There’s a density to the text and a constant flow of exposition and explanation that carries you along as you read and feels as though there’s a great flow of information pouring into you. Imagine Jane Austen as a modern American man talking about race and you’ll get some idea of the style.

As I read, quite slowly in short bursts, Obama was spending his first months in power. He’d promised to close down Guantanamo Bay, we cheered, then there was the banking collapse and the car industry troubles, the focus on Afghanistan rather than Iraq. Things went a litle quiet for a while, there was a new dog, I began to wonder if he was going to get anything done. The news came that Guantanamo wasn’t going to close after all and Obama started to look like a bit of puffed-up optimism rather than an effective left-wing (for America, anyway) politician.

I felt naive for projecting my own hopes onto the text. A man who’d worked as a community organiser and decided to become a lawyer so he could make a contribution, rather than earn a lot of money, would surely be an entirely different kind of president, I’d thought, but here he is, backing down over one of the United States’ most glaring human rights abuses that he’d made one of his first-day priorities on gaining office.

Bugger it. Spin and rubbish. Tony Blair all over again.

I limped along through the final sections looking for something to be optimistic about, but this book is a mirror. It’ll tell you whatever you like about the man. Either he’s a socially-minded reformer or a cynical opportunist telling the Democrats what they want to know. I put it down feeling just that bit worse about the world.

Now, though, I’m cocking an ear again. Weak though the plan might be, there’s a universal health care plan slowly battling its way towards the statute books in Washington. He might not be as exciting as he first appeared, but if he can turn himself into Nye Bevan then he’s OK by me. I’m sure he’ll be very relieved to hear that.

John Adams is a fascinating figure, a genuine radical democrat, lawyer and polemicist who played a crucial role in the independence and early years of the United States. He was one of the delegates to the Continental Congress that produced the Declaration of Independence, and wrote the world’s oldest functioning constitution for Massachusetts. He eventually became the nation’s second President.

What emerges from David McCullough’s excellent biography is how sharply the original thirteen states were divided on a variety of issues, and none more than slavery. It’s amazing that it took more than fifty years for the civil war to erupt given the extent of disagreement on that issue.

“John Adams”

David McCullough
Simon & Schuster 2008, Paperback, 768 pages, £12.99

Adams and others believed that slavery was an absolute moral wrong and could not be defended on any grounds whatsoever. They believed that failing to address the issue in the constitution was a fatal error that would return to haunt the union. Adams’ more famous colleague Thomas Jefferson, often seen as a great and enlightened man, was himself the owner of many slaves, as did General George Washington. As President Obama reminded the world in his inauguration address, the President’s house and the Capitol itself were built by slaves. It’s impossible to think of Adams being other than delighted at Obama’s victory, although surely he would have been depressed at the amount of time it took to reach the stage where an African American could be considered worthy of the Presidency.

Adams began life as a provincial lawyer and made his name defending British soldiers who had opened fire on an angry mob in Boston in 1770. Adams was the only lawyer prepared to take their case and successfully defended six out of eight of them. His independence of mind, on display for the rest of his life, was perhaps never challenged more than on this occasion.

His career was one of astonishing breadth. He was sent to Europe as Congress’s representative and spent a significant amount of time in France, Holland and, eventually, England. He was responsible for negotiating a peace treaty with the former colonial power.

Adams was a controversial and radical figure even after the revolution and was somewhat surprisingly selected as Washington’s Vice President. Typically, Adams took his role as President of the Senate extremely seriously and was unable to prevent himself addressing frequent lengthy lectures to the chamber.

This was an era of a totally invasive and scurrilous press, and one of government feeling its way towards some idea of how the constitution would work in practice. It’s fascinating to read about how, even with a written constitution, and an enlightened one at that, the government was still subject to convention and the public’s expectation.

Despite being an unpopular Vice President (especially with the Congress), Adams succeeded Washington to become the second President of the United States. Somewhat controversially, he only served one term, and his Presidency was plagued by divisions and betrayals. Presidential elections were very different at this point from the three year nation-wide tour they have since become. It was all rather cosy and campaigning was in effect outlawed, although his opponents certainly did not respect this convention.

The most controversial element of his Presidency was the series of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. From today’s vantage point these laws have a distinct resemblance to George W. Bush’s odious Patriot Act. McCullough is perhaps too lenient on Adams here and ascribes his acquiescence to his reluctance to contradict the Congress and his hostile cabinet.

The events surrounding his defeat in his re-election campaign caused him to sever all contact with Jefferson, who succeeded him, even though they had been on intimate terms for many years. He didn’t even attend Jefferson’s inauguration.

The last years of Adams’ life saw an eventual reconciliation with Jefferson – a relationship so well healed that Adams’ last words were ‘Thomas Jefferson survives’. In an astonishing, and one is tempted to say, all-American coincidence, Jefferson had in fact died only some hours earlier. To add further piquancy, they both died on the 4th July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence that they had both played such a major role in creating.

Throughout the book, McCullough draws on the massive number of letters that Adams wrote during his long life. Every so often, the narrative becomes a bit bogged down in the letters and hefty quote follows hefty quote. However, the benefits of this approach far outweigh the negatives, as we are given a wonderful and intimate picture of Adams’ long marriage to his wife Abigail.

If the book has a fault it is that Adams is given the benefit of the doubt at every opportunity, even though as a politician he was fairly inept. It’s a nice irony that such a fierce defender of the people and their rights was unable to conduct policy in a way that was consistent with those rights; in that sense his defeat is reminiscent of Churchill’s post-war loss to Atlee. He was the right man to fight for independence, but not the right one to help preserve it.

His legacy is impressive, even if his Presidency is less so. His son, John Quincy Adams, an even more gifted intellectual than Adams, became the 6th President of the United States. His wisdom and learning reached many subsequent generations through his writings and the part he played in the creation of America’s founding documents, and his humanity and intellectual honesty are an inspiration to many today.

David McCollough’s biography is a well-written and fascinating read, and provides a detailed look at an uncommonly gifted, frustrating, likeable politician from another age.

I’ve been bitten by the Ulysses bug. Suddenly, I’m hoovering up everything I can find about its author and his masterwork. Here, English critic Andrew Gibson places Joyce firmly in the context of Irish literature, and Ulysses as the ‘national epic’.

James Joyce (Critical Lives)

Andrew Gibson
Reaktion Books 2006, Paperback, 192 pages, £10.95

Joyce wrote Ulysses, as we are told at the end of the novel in Trieste-Zürich-Paris; he had left Ireland for good in 1904 and started his masterpiece in 1914. Of course, Joyce is normally placed in the modernist movement, along with other exiles like Picasso and Stravinsky, centred on Paris. In fact most of Ulysses was written before he moved to Paris, and he and his wife Nora never settled there as they had done in Trieste.

There are chapters on each of Joyce’s books – although his play Exiles is somewhat glossed over – focusing on their essential Irishness rather than their modernism.

It should be obvious to anyone who has read Ulysses that it is unquestionably a work of Irish literature. It is about other things than just Dublin or just Ireland, but to place it in any other context to the exclusion of its country of birth is to eliminate its most important motivation. How else are we to interpret Stephen Dedalus’s words in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

This is a useful, insightful and compact look at the writing life of one of the 20th century’s great masters of the novel.

This is the third Alison Weir book I’ve read. She tends to cover the period of European history I’m most interested in i.e. Medieval and Renaissance and to write about women who have, if not disappeared, then faded in comparison with the men who were shaping events around them. Very little information survives about Katherine Swynford yet, according to Weir, she holds a unique place in the public’s imagination due to Anya Seton’s romance, Katherine, published in 1954.

I remember reading Katherine as a teenager and it definitely contributed to my picking this book up in Foyles. But there the comparison ends. This is a serious history and it goes a long way towards resurrecting a woman whose reputation, whilst being distinctly ‘iffy’ during her lifetime, was whitewashed by later generations. Why? Because as John of Gaunt’s mistress and, later, his third wife, she helped found the Houses of Tudor and Stuart. All sorts of famous people are descended from her including five American presidents (yes, Dubya’s one of them!), Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Di, Winston Churchill, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Bertrand Russell.

Katherine Swynford

Alison Weir
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2007, Hardcover, 384 pages, £20.00

But, as I’ve said, not much information survives about the woman herself. No matter. Alison Weir does an excellent job of bringing what little is known of Katherine vividly to life. This is detective work of the highest calibre. I’m no historian but it seems to me the author has left no stone unturned. Many of her contemporary references come from a chronicler called Jean Froissart and he really gets going when Katherine finally marries John of Gaunt and is made Duchess of Lancaster:

“When the news of this marriage reached the great ladies of England… they were surprised and shocked, considering it scandalous, and thought the Duke much to blame. They said that he had sadly disgraced himself by marrying… a woman of light character… For their parts, they would leave her to do the honours of the court herself for they would never enter any place where she was. They themselves might be disgraced if they permitted a woman of so base a birth… to have place before them. Their hearts would burst with vexation, and rightly so!”

Feathers were similarly ruffled some twenty-three years earlier when Katherine first became John’s mistress: his “unspeakable concubine”, “a witch and a whore”. Yet, as Weir points out, she “confounded her critics and gradually came to be tolerated and even respected”. How she did this – basically, by behaving with grace and dignity and keeping her head down when the going got tough – forms the greater part of the book.

This is not a light book – it chronicles Katherine’s life year by year in meticulous and sometimes humdrum detail – but because of its subject’s illustrious connections, not to mention her own achievements, it is a fascinating one. Weir takes us through the middle part of the Hundred Years War and the Peasants’ Revolt; she introduces us to some fascinating characters including Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV and, of course, John of Gaunt himself, a complex, ambitious man who was nevertheless a much-needed stabilising force in Parliament. She also tells us about Geoffrey Chaucer who was married to Katherine’s sister and who didn’t just sit around writing but worked in a variety of jobs, some exciting, some menial, according to whether he was in or out of favour.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about a complicated, sometimes grisly yet always interesting period of history. If you also happen to enjoy gossip and intrigue, and are a sucker for what is, according to Weir, “essentially, a love story” then so much the better.

Mrs. Chppy’s Last Expedition: the Remarkable Journal of Shackleton’s Polar-bound Cat is just a cracking good read! Alexander is an accomplished writer and researcher on English naval history, including an account of the crew’s survival on the ill-fated Endurance expedition to the Antarctic.

In this book, rather than give us Sir Ernest Shackleton’s or another sailor’s perspective, Alexander imagines the entries of the journal kept by the ship’s tomcat, called Mrs. Chippy (by some anatomically ill-informed shipmates). So convincing does Alexander strive to make the journal, that her name isn’t prominent anywhere on the cover or title page. I even debated whether or not to include the author’s name in the blog post heading, so as not to ruin the effect.

The account is a fun mix of rigorous research and anthropomorphic fantasy. The many footnotes gleaned from Royal Geographical society and Scottish Geographical Society archives are complemented by playful references from the likes of Lord Mouser-Hunt. Feline arrogance is brilliantly articulated and the photographic captions – many with Mrs. Chippy *just* out of frame, are a great addition. By Mrs. Chippy’s own account, he was central to every aspect of the functioning of the ship. Without going that far, I can easily imagine that a cat onboard would be a good morale booster given the harsh and bleak day-to-day existence as the crew struggled unsuccessfully to wrest the Endurance from the pincer-like encroachment of the surrounding ice. A humorous take on a naval expedition and an excellent lure for readers like me who wouldn’t otherwise venture to the Maritime History section of the bookshop.

This is one of those Taschen books you can pick up at Tate Modern for £5.99. They do loads of artists and I bought Rousseau and Jean-Michel Basquiat but I could have bought them all – they’re lovely: full of nicely reproduced pictures and lively, informative text. You can probably guess I don’t know a huge amount about art which is why a book like this is perfect for me – seven chapters of the basics: life and times, major works, a bit of art crit. It’s interesting, for example, to know where Rousseau sits on the Impressionist spectrum. Apparently, he’s a post-Impressionist who prefigures Cubism. This is because he used flat blocks of colour and played with conventional ideas of perspective. For a long time he was thought of as an outsider, partly because he had a day job (he was a toll collector) and partly because he had no formal training (Cornelia Stabenow calls his painting “introverted, almost autistic”).

Rousseau started out as a bit of a joke on the Paris art scene as people struggled to understand his puppet-like figures and garish jungle scenes. Although his most famous picture is probably “Surprise!” (showing a tiger creeping through an exotic rain-lashed forest), he also painted many scenes in and around Paris, particularly of the docks where he spent his days checking cargoes. His bosses were apparently lenient and allowed him time and space to paint while at work. One striking self-portrait shows him centre stage on the dockside, a ship behind him flying brightly coloured flags, behind that the recently erected Tour Eiffel and in the sky that crazy new French invention, the hot air balloon. In fact, he painted himself into lots of his pictures, often as a tiny black figure distinguishable from all the other tiny black figures only by a wide-brimmed hat. He also painted pictures of his two wives, Clémence (Numéro une) and Joséphine (Numéro deux), and, in one rather grim portrait of himself with Joséphine, put icons of the couple’s dead spouses above their heads.

Henri Rousseau 1844 – 1910.

Cornelia Stabenow
Taschen Verlag 2001, Paperback, 96 pages, £4.80

The “gentle douanier” (as Apollinaire nicknamed him) gave up work to concentrate on painting in 1893 but was never really financially comfortable despite hobnobbing with everyone who was anyone on the fin-de-siècle French art scene. Pablo Picasso even threw a party in his honour although the guests had to survive on wine and tinned sardines, the food having been mistakenly ordered for the following day. Right up till his death from blood poisoning (probably alcohol-related) in 1910, Rousseau was supplementing his income with teaching and busking on the violin. The year before he died he was nearly sent to jail for fraud and, in fact, throughout his life he wasn’t above bending the truth or indulging in a bit of petty pilfering (whilst boasting of deeds of derring-do in Mexico, he was actually serving time in a detention centre for theft).

For me, this colourful life is reflected in the artist’s exuberant use of colour – from his lush jungle paintings (it’s said he used fifty shades of green in “The Dream”) to his marionette-like child portraits and vivid Parisian landscapes. Again and again, I find myself gasping at his skies which are breathtakingly beautiful, each one different from the last. As my favourite colours are red, green and blue, I guess it’s no surprise I picked Rousseau – with his red flags, boats, uniforms, hats and roofs, his green leaves and blue, blue skies – out of the rich selection of artists on offer from Taschen.

Not long ao, I finished the Diving Bell and the Butterfly in the language it was ‘written’ in. The text was actually conducted by its author through the blinking of his left eye, the only part of his body not afflicted by the rare vascular condition ‘Locked-in Syndrome.’ The sheer existence of this book is extraordinary. Jean-Dominique Bauby was editor-in-chief of France’s Elle magazine before becoming victim of a sudden stroke and ensuing coma on December 8th, 1995 at 43 years of age. While Alexandre Dumas created a character in the Count of Monte Cristo, M. Noirtier de Villefort, who suffered from Locked-in Syndrome, little has ever been documented about the experience of being fully alert but lacking the body’s physical co-operation to communicate in any way. Bauby’s eye – and awe-inspiring determination – kept him linked to the world beyond his own body and allowed him to convey his memoirs shortly before dying.
Using a reordered alphabet based on the frequency of use in the French language (ESARINTULOMDPCFBVHGJQZYXKW) [tangent: given that 'E' is the single most commonly used letter in the French language, Georges Perec's A Void/ La Disparition is all the more impressive for not containing a single use of the vowel], Bauby offers his insights on his condition, his emotions and his life as was. The way he communicates his helplessness, occasional lonlieness and frequent frustration rarely descends into self-pity, though if anyone should be allowed to feel self-pity, it would be him. He reminisces about simple things such as savouring seasonal salty saucisson or relaxing in a bath and turning off the tap with a dextrous toe. My words can’t match Bauby’s own, so I’ll have to rely on cliche and call this a beautiful, moving book. The author died ten short days after the book was published in France. I’ll say it again: he really did leave the world something extraordinary.