Monday, February 25, 2008

Who was Howard Kirk?

Malcolm Bradbury’s university novel The History Man was published in 1975, and ever since literary academics have been wondering who the main character, Howard Kirk, was based on.

On January 12, Guardian Review published, for no apparent reason, a page of praise for the novel by Bradbury’s good friend David Lodge – who also writes university English department comedies, and is quick to tell us that his Changing Places also appeared in 1975.

Kirk is interesting because he is sexually rapacious and politically significant.

As Lodge puts it: “We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views”.

Lodge is careful to repeat that the novel is set at the University of Watermouth, in a fictitious town on the south coast of England – so Sussex might be meant. But Bradbury was writing about his own university, the University of East Anglia, where he worked from 1966 until his retirement in 1995. He was knighted in 2000, the year of his death, though he has now no reputation as a critic – only The History Man survives.

Howard Kirk was based on three academics at UEA. One was Jonathan Raban, now a travel writer and novelist. Another was an academic nonentity called Pete Mercer, whose Lothario-like activities come as a surprise to anybody who ever met him. And the third was Howard Temperley, a historian of America who had the misfortune to work with Bradbury – whose specialism was American literature.

The great talking point is the way in which feminist academic Annie Callendar falls dramatically for Raban – sorry, Howard Kirk – for how can she do that? As Lodge puts it, Kirk “tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat, and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed”. This caused debate: “Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it….Couples quarrelled about it”.

As everybody at UEA would have known, Annie Callender was based on English professor and feminist Lorna Sage.

She is best remembered for her autobiographical Bad Blood (2000), the story of an agonised childhood and adolescence. She wrote feminist book reviews for the Observer for many years, and for LRB and TLS. A lifelong smoker, she died of emphysema in 2001.

In the novel, the seduction takes place after a party at the Mangolds, who were Bradbury himself and his wife Elizabeth. Kirk’s other main sexual victim is Felicity Phee, in real life a put-upon art history MA, who was known to Bradbury (unnamed here because never famous).

An unhappily-married character called Beamish was based on the well-known Professor of Linguistics, Roger Fowler.

Bradbury’s satire is directed cruelly against women. Kirk, repulsive as he is, is allowed to get away with his sexual and political campaigns. The women are uniformly defeated.
If you know the real story – and there is more – Bradbury comes out of it all as a writer willing to exploit vulnerable women, and to satirise feminists by imagining their humiliating seduction.

Politically, The History Man was a disaster for the reputation of universities. The novel didn’t make much impact in 1975, but when it was adapted as a television series in 1981, it gave support to the prejudices of the Conservative government (elected in 1979), one that Thatcher’s ministers were only too willing to exploit.

Kirk persecutes a conservative-minded student in a way that no left-academic was ever known to do. Bradbury never got the point. It was impossible to explain to him that there might be something wrong about his characterisation of the political left in the early 1970s. Despite the genial, put-upon, almost bumbling and inoffensive persona that he tried to project as “himself” in the novel, and in the late-night-talking, pipe-smoking, party-giving professor of real life, he was politically paranoid about the changes of the 1960s.

He saw the liberalism that he practised under threat. It pushed him to the right politically, but he believed he was still defending liberal values.

He wasn’t. He was a Trojan horse for the political right, and the universities have not recovered yet from the consequences of the policies that he helped Thatcherism to impose.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Stephen Glover v. Nick Davies (again)

The Indy’s obsession with Nick Davies continues, and Stephen Glover is back with a sermon, advising Nick and nice Sunday Times investigative journalist David Leppard to settle their differences over a drink rather than in the courts. (Leppard is threatening action through libel solicitors Carter Ruck.)

Stephen is careful to say that he has never met Davies (or Leppard): so we know he’s been reading M. Apache, who thought – see 12 February below – that his criticism of Nick was based on personal animus. It’s just that when Glover writes, it sounds like that….

Then Oliver Duff turns up doing the Media Diary (not for too long, we hope), with a story explaining the animus behind Peter Preston’s Guardian review of Davies’s book. This goes back to an unpleasantness in 1984, involving Davies sending a solicitor’s letter – followed by a twenty-three year mutual freeze-out. (Young Apache, learning his trade within sight of Preston all those years ago, rather admired him; not any more.)

And finally Nick Davies himself turns up on the Indy’s letters page, rubbishing Kamal Ahmed’s complaints that Davies hadn’t done proper research into Kamal’s ‘Campbell Ahmad’ years at the Observer. Those complaints were made in an interview with Michael Savage whose effect was to undermine Glover’s earlier attack on Davies. (See Indy, 11 February, and M. Apache, 12 February.)

Nick Davies now reveals it was Kamal himself who spoke into Davies’s tape-recorder, and admitted that Ali Campbell let him have a private view of the “dodgy dossier”. The rest of his case against Kamal was equally carefully researched.

Glover “suspects” that Davies is “mostly wrong” in his criticisms of Leppard. Just as he “suspected” that Davies was wrong about Kamal Ahmed? At the same time he praises Davies and Leppard as among the “depleted guild of investigative reporters”. So which is it, Stephen? Guesswork and suspicion, a tone of animus – or a little bit of investigative work on your own account?

In this tangle, not meeting Nick Davies is not so bright.

What do we have so far?

Stephen Glover is a demented moralist and lefty-baiter incapable of picking up the phone.

Nick Davies supported the Iraq war: ‘for better or worse, I was pro-war’. Worse, Nick, worse.

Peter Preston writes a review skewed by a 23-year feud.

Kamal Ahmed gives a feeble-minded interview that was bound to be found out.

Oliver Duff has a story, but is a grinning prat who can’t quite write a payoff line.

Does all this matter? Yes, because it is these journalists who brought us the Iraq war, cash for honours – and Leppard’s story that Michael Foot was a KGB agent.
And where now is Matthew Norman?

Come back, Matt – we need your plumpness and wit!

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Rejecting History – or why Barack Obama will win

Why are so many Americans voting for Barack Obama? The short answer has to do with Obama’s campaign themes – the future, hope, change – each nicely affirmative and innocent. The longer answer is a bit more fraught. All the January candidates, including Mitt Romney and John Edwards, copped the theme of change, but none could so embody the rejection of history, key to understanding this election, as Barack Obama. He sounds like Martin Luther King, but as a young black man, he also looks like a repudiation of the past.

Walt Whitman knew and approved the American principle of the upstart new. In his first bardic pronouncement in 1855, Whitman declared, “America does not the repel the past. . .,” but of course he knew it does. Later in that same sentence the past is “the corpse. . . slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house.” Oh, the past, history, might reside still in the drawing room, where the books are and guests are entertained, but not where people actually live.

Is this anti-intellectual? Yes, it can take that form. Is it risky for America? Again, yes. But so is fear, even fear grounded in history and its precedents, both of which can be misunderstood.
What history is it that informs the war in Iraq—Munich in 1938? Vietnam? And which Vietnam – the one I remember of an ill-conceived imperial interference in somebody else’s civil war, or the one Ronald Reagan described, of an American army betrayed by sissy civilians unwilling to win?

If Whitman has an opposite in American literary history, it is William Faulkner – dark, haunted by the past that “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Yet Faulkner recognized that sometimes the past requires the exercise of conscience to reject it utterly, as does Isaac in Faulkner’s 1942 story “The Bear,” who conceives of America as refuge from “the old world’s worthless evening.”

Alas, the new world has gotten so old and so guilty.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has erred from the start. Her trumpeted “experience” – albeit much of it as someone’s wife – has hit precisely the wrong notes. Experience equals the past. The Clintons have had their turn, and many Americans no more want a continuation of that past than they do the immediate past of the Bush years.

The decisive mood of the American people this year is driven less by a specific set of hopes than by exhaustion, and a consequent desire to escape a history that has become altogether too burdensome for an impatient people. We want to turn from the history book to science fiction. Science, we think, will save us and the planet.

In less general terms, many of us simply want to blot out the last seven years in as dramatic a way as we can. We want to “repel” a recent history marked by a President’s arrogance and willful ignorance. We want to redefine ourselves anew. We want to light out for a new territory.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Nick Davies bitten – but not very hard…

Down at the Café Coup de Poing there is agreement along the zinc that M. Apache was right to move in on Stephen Glover’s attack on Nick Davies a week ago. In this Monday’s Independent Media there’s more, so someone is obsessing.

Davies’s prime target was Observer political editor Kamal Ahmed.

Under the headline “‘Nick is a Coward’. Ahmed bites back”, Michael Savage allows Ahmad to reply, but it’s a soft bite.

Nick was “a coward” because he didn’t ask Observer editor Roger Alton about the allegations against Ahmed before publishing. Unprofessional. Roger would have put him right.

Reminder: Glover attacked Davies last week for suggesting in Flat Earth News that Kamal Ahmed, recently retired (unh, sorry, moved on to duller things) political editor of The Observer was too close to Ali Campbell, and did his bidding in moving the Obs to a pro-war position on the Iraq war, thereby softening up potentially discontented Labour MPs.

M. Apache wrote last time that Davies made it clear on a Today interview – about as conspicuous as you can get – that his sources were informed but unhappy lower-order journalists who (Apache pointed out) couldn’t be named because they’d lose their jobs. The peasants, Davies called them. He didn’t expect the lords and ladies to answer his questions.

Again close reading is required. Ahmed is quoted as saying that over the pro-Iraq war issue it was editor Roger Alton who made the decision, and it wasn’t he who did the pushing. Then he says: “Of course, there were tensions. And some people, a tiny minority, may have misconstrued that as being because I was too close to Number Ten”. That was indeed the allegation.

Then Savage sinks Ahmed’s boat, writing:

In fact, senior staff at The Observer did approach Ahmed with their concerns. One says he did believe Ahmed had become too close to Campbell, and told him so. “Kamal would go around calling himself ‘Campbell Ahmad’,” he recalls. “A joke’s a joke, but at the same time, never a truer word was said.” And according to one political reporter, Ahmed’s one-to-one with Campbell on that flight [to Washington DC, when Ahmed was talked to and shown a copy of the “dodgy dossier” ahead of anyone else] and his two trips to Chequers to interview the Prime Minister were more unusual than he would like to admit. (Indy Media, 11 February 2008)


Notice anything here? Savage names no sources! “Senior staff…one says…one political reporter.” Nobody thinks this is invalid because there are no names. But the essence of Kamal’s case against Davies is – that he doesn’t name his sources! (“There’s…not one person on the record.”) Savage’s reporting both confirms the truth of what Davies was saying, and repeats the methods he used to say it.

If the Indy can do it, why not Davies?

Ahmed complains that Davies did not ask editor Roger Alton about his allegations. (Alton and Ahmed are close friends, Savage says.) But Davies did “run them all past” Alton’s deputy Paul Webster in a two-hour meeting. What, Apache wonders, is the difference? Did Webster not know how the paper’s Iraq decision was made?

Davies is consistent here – in his probably justified belief that talking to Alton would have got him nowhere. Particularly as Ahmad was Alton’s protégé.

Deliberately or not, Savage’s interview with Ahmad undermines Glover’s view, expressed a week before, that Nick Davies is a journalistic villain. Perhaps there is some tension at Indy Media these days? Just the person to enlighten us would be Good Guy media diarist Matthew Norman, surely? Never mind Gaunty, let’s hear about Glover.

Come on, Matthew – tell us what you know!

12 February

Kate Nash – fad, or just bad?

Actually, both will suit Apache just fine.

As the countdown to the BRIT awards begins, there are some interesting nominations, the most offensive of which is Kate Nash in the British Female Solo Artist category.

Kate Nash’s route to stardom is a quaint little tale of rejection and injury (not just for the people unlucky enough to hear her sing). Young Kate was an aspiring actor, who applied to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – sadly she was rejected (she has not been forthcoming as to why), and went to watch Ang Lee’s masterpiece Brokeback Mountain to quell her sadness. Whilst there she fell down a flight of stairs and broke her – no, not back – but foot.

It was during her healing time that Miss Nash decided to pursue a career in music and uploaded songs onto social networking site MySpace. Fast-forward to her asking Lily Allen to champion her on the web, and recording a dire first single “Caroline’s a Victim” (YouTube video here…if you dare) that somehow got her signed.

Then came her second single, the so-called smash hit, “Foundations”.

It was while Monsieur Apache was sitting at a piano one day that the illusion of Kate Nash came crumbling down. He struck a C chord, and this triggered something – this was the first chord of “Foundations”, which was getting inescapable airplay at the time. Referring to the Youtube video, Monsieur Apache soon unravelled the secrets of Miss Nash’s songwriting…or rather the simplicity of it.

It was just C, F and G-major chords!

All the way through. The solitary modulation was an A-minor in the chorus (possibly forced by the record label?) . No complexity.

(Explainer: C is the middle note of the piano, and gives the easiest key and scale because there are no accidentals [black notes on the keyboard]). This is the first thing you learn on the piano; young Apache learned it at the age of seven.

Such musical simple-mindedness is astounding in a nominated artist, especially as Nash is so proud of being a “singer/songwriter”. If musicality were valued, then she’d be dismissed for lack of anything approaching the originality of other piano-based singer/songwriters such as Regina Spektor or Ben Folds.

What is the difference between Kate Nash and these others? It would seem to be her “excruciatingly crispy clear vocals” (NME, June 18, 2007). That’s one way to describe her voice; another would be to say that it’s an irritating cockney drawl from the Skinner/Allen school of enunciation. Apache’s friend _______ went to school with Nash, and told me one evening that it’s all deliberate – a clever ruse to jump on the regional accent bandwagon.
It’s not just the accent though; it’s the lack of imagery, metaphor, and wordplay in her lyrics. See fellow BRIT nominee Bat for Lashes or PJ Harvey for the real thing.

All is not lost however. Apache discovers that her supposed smash hit “Foundations” made it to number one only in Croatia (the hub of all good music, surely?), but regrettably the media-receptive British did buy enough copies of Nash’s album Made of Bricks for it to reach number one, despite several bad reviews. But it dropped very quickly, and is not even in the top 40 at the moment. Perhaps the public are beginning to hear those simple chords.

Monsieur Apache hopes that the regional accent trend will pass, and that the “Skins”-watching generation will realise they’re being spoon-fed fad after fad. Let’s hope that on February 20th either Natasha Khan (Bat for Lashes) or the memorable PJ Harvey will take the BRIT award for solo female singer.

Come on, music fans – look for talent!

Monday, February 11, 2008

Archbishop’s incredible feat: he unites the British

Archbishop Rowan Williams has united the nation for the first time since the end of World War Two. The UK has changed so rapidly and become so diverse in its peoples and cultures that it was thought no longer possible to decide which common characteristics define “Britishness”. Politicians tried, but it was beyond them. In one cunning move the Spiritual Leader of this sceptered isle has united us all.

All he had to do was to be fair to Muslims by presenting a carefully-reasoned argument – that certain elements of sharia be incorporated into the British legal system in much the same way that Orthodox Jews have some decisions of their own legal bodies so incorporated. The British rose up as one – the politicians, churchmen, and lawyers, the media and even the man on the Shepherd’s Bush Omnibus (himself one third Muslim), to proclaim what they were, but more especially, what they were not. The furore shows the British have three negative and two positive preferences:

Negative:
1. We are a nation that dislikes reasoned argument. The more closely-reasoned the argument, and the more erudite the exponent, the more they are despised.

2. Instead the British much prefer rhetoric and abuse, especially as used by the Sun, which implied that the Archbishop was not only a goat, but a dangerous goat. Does the Sun believe that Rowan has horns? Nope: Sun journalists just hate beards (now known as facial hair), with which the Archbishop is rather obviously well-endowed.

3. The British know they are allergic to sharia law.

Positive:
4. The British love the rule of their own law, since amputation is not allowed, and no-one is stoned to death (literally as opposed to figuratively). Furthermore, women have equal rights with men (and no beards). Surprisingly, this view is shared by a large number of British Muslims who clearly value the absence of sharia law-enforcement in their daily lives in Britain, and have taken to saying how wonderful British law is.

5. The British have been reminded of how much they hate religion, because over the past 1000 years it has been the basis for hatred. And used to justify unjustifiable acts by people of one persuasion against others.

So if you love God but are British, keep it to yourself.

Well done Archbishop, keep it up!

Seriously though…
Secular society has recently been characterised by some religious thinkers as equivalent to a religious group, but a group lacking the God who decrees law and conduct. Such a group, it is argued, has no right to impose its views on other belief groups, to which it is equivalent.

This ingenious anti-secularism is a desperate argument. But it is one of the contexts in which Williams, a sensitive theologian, has to work.

So was the sharia speech an attempt to bring religious considerations of any kind – Muslim, Christian, Jewish – back into secular life?

The storm created by the Archbishop demonstrates that secular society is not just a godless religious group but instead provides the ground upon which all individuals, whether members of a religious group or not, are given equality, are legitimised, and supported. This legitimisation and support is limited only by a series of rights and obligations applicable to all individuals within civil society. A secular society may be the only type of society that can support multiple ethnic and religious groups on a basis of equality. Secular society limits the special claims characteristic of some religious groups that they alone have access to the One Truth which others would benefit from adopting too, from which they argue their right to dominate and impose their beliefs.

It is secularism that guarantees the survival of religious activity.

11 February

Friday, February 8, 2008

Capa unrolled

Best cultural news of the week: Capa’s negatives from the Spanish Civil War are being scanned from the nitrate originals. The work is being done by the international Centre of Photography in New York, There’s a page of contact prints here.

Radio 4’s Today interviewer raised the question of whether the new discovery would show whether or not Capa’s famous Falling Soldier of 1936 “had been staged”. Since nobody except one or two right-wing historians now believes it was, this was a step too far. The interviewee tactfully kept clear.

Come on Today, keep up!

BV – M?

Why was Brian Vickers given a K in the New Year honours list? It was for “services to literary scholarship”, but while he is heard of in university literary studies, he is hardly a star, like Sir Frank Kermode. Kermode has a long history of writing important criticism across a vast range (Bible, Shakespeare, modernism…), editing texts, and getting out there into radio, tv and journalism.

Vickers is a Renaissance specialist, has done several books on Shakespeare, and taken up the dull topic of Rhetoric. He has edited texts, and written criticism, including lots of reviews for the TLS, but he is neither admired, nor known to the public.

He is a vigorous controversialist, of the pedantic-aggressive kind (which doesn’t appeal to Monsieur Apache). Sometimes his scholarly aggression gets out of hand – a PhD candidate once biffed him during a viva, his questioning was so aggressive.

There are a dozen critics who have done as much as Vickers has done. So why choose him for a K?

Down at the Café Coup de Poing, my anarchist copain Andrés sips his américan and hints that recruitment for the secret services must still go on somehow, with reliable academics pointing suitable recruits in the right direction.

Come on Brian, is M your friend?

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Stephen Glover: can’t think, can’t argue

What’s the matter with Stephen Glover of the Independent? Nasty attack on Nick Davies (one of the Good Guys), whose Flat Earth News about the laziness and corruption of the British press is just out. “Damning allegations that, if true, bring disgrace upon ‘The Observer’” is the headline over a piece (Independent Media, 4 February) so badly argued it must have personal animus behind it.

Glover tells us Davies’s criticism of The Observer, and then writes as though what he’s just written isn’t the case.

His summary of Davies says that Number 10 and Alistair Campbell wanted the Observer on side over support for the Iraq war, because skeptical Labour MPs might be persuaded by this liberal newspaper. So political editor Kamal Ahmed was given a “sneak preview” of the lying “dodgy dossier” of February 2002. Glover then goes berserk, and says Davies is claiming that “the editor and political editor of a great liberal newspaper were suborned by Number 10, and so manipulated that The Observer became a government mouthpiece”. This is “amazing stuff”, apparently.

Then, writes Glover, “One also notices that when two newspapers wrote about Mr Davies’s book last October [Apache missed this], he responded in terms that were virtually misleading: ‘The hacks who have said that the book accuses Kamal Ahmed of helping to write or edit the dodgy dossier are simply wrong’, he [Davies] remarked.” Glover goes on: “Well, no, he does not precisely say that, but what he does say is almost as combustible”.

I get it: Davies was “virtually misleading” about something that Glover admits he didn’t say.

And what was so combustible? That Kamal Ahmed was softened up by being given a “sneak preview” of the dossier. Which is Glover’s own account of the allegation.

Unable to set up a straight argument, Glover turns to innuendo. More than once he remarks that Davies “provides no evidence” for (eg) the suggestion that chunks of Alistair Campbell’s emails were lifted and inserted into The Observer’s “pro-war editorials”. (So Number 10’s policy worked.)

But Glover must know – and he would certainly have known after Davies’s spirited interview on R4’s Today on 5 February – that Davies’s sources were not the lords of journalism, but “the peasants” – working journalists who knew what was really going on, and told him.

Does Glover seriously think that these journalists would allow themselves to be identified, and lose their jobs? And why is Glover pretending he doesn’t know this?

That is why Apache thinks there’s personal animus here.

And just look at what Alistair Campbell in his Diary has to say about Stephen Glover: “a deeply unpleasant man”. Suppose Ali was right for once, and this is true? It would explain a lot.

First question: is The Observer still a “great liberal newspaper”?

Come on Stephen, think straight and be nicer!