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C O N T E N T S No. 6214 May 6 2022 the-tls.co.uk UK £4.50 | USA $8.99 T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T Susan Owens Eccentric gardeners | Patricia A. Matthew Decoding costume drama Miranda Seymour Elizabeth Lowry’s Hardy | Joe Moran Premonitions of disaster Portrait of the artist James Fenton on Picasso and his biographer “Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Woman sitting on a chair)” by Pablo Picasso, 1941 © Henie Onstad Collection, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Photographer: Øystein Thorvaldsen. 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York In this issue The first three volumes of John Richardson’s bio- graphy of Picasso cover the artist’s life until the age of fifty. Richardson died three years ago, before he could complete the fourth, leaving it to his col- laborators, Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, to end the narrative in 1943, when Picasso was sixty- one and keeping his head down in Nazi–occupied Paris. The artist still had another thirty years to live. But although his project is incomplete, Richardson’s gossipy but scholarly work looks built to last. The final volume captures the artistic decade in which Picasso painted “Guernica” (1937) and “Night Fish- ing at Antibes” (1939) and, as Richardson put it, “Picassified” a succession of wives and mistresses. Richardson makes fruitful connections between Picasso’s life and his art: he records the artist’s “maîtresse en titre”, the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, turning to Catholicism after a particularly blue period with the artist, explaining that “After Picasso, there is only God”. James Fenton, the poet, critic and war correspondent, turns the tables on the biographer in his review of Richardson’s Life of Picasso: Volume Four. Fenton detects “a whiff of sulphur” about Richardson, centring on his twelveyear mutually exploitative relationship with Douglas Cooper, a wealthy collector who introduced him to Picasso’s adoring circle. Richardson’s indiscretions are a gift to art critics. The characters in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics will doubtless inspire many imitators. Prominent among them is Sir Charles Isham, who introduced the gnome to English gardens in the 1860s, inspired by his travels in Germany. Isham populated his Northamptonshire estate with models of fairy miners, but our reviewer Susan Owens suggests he gave them a peculiarly English twist: “a militant group are captured on camera taking strike action in Sir Charles’s rockery”. Are newspapers failing in invention these days? Sam Knight has written an account of a “Premonitions Bureau” set up in 1966 by the psychiatrist John Barker and Peter Fairley, a science journalist, with the blessing of Charles Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard. “For a year”, writes Joe Moran in his review of the book, “the newspaper’s readers would be asked to send in their forebodings of unwelcome events, which would be collated and then compared with actual events.” Barker envisaged the Premonitions Bureau as a “central clearing house” for all portents of calamities, “a data bank for the nation’s dreams and visions”. The circumstances that led to the bureau’s closure were likely foreseen, too. MARTIN IVENS Editor Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement @the.tls @TheTLS To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS, go to shop.the-tls.co.uk 2 3 ART HISTORY JAMES FENTON 4 HORTICULTURE 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR SUSAN OWENS A Life of Picasso – The minotaur years 1933–1943 John Richardson; With the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga. Picasso – Painting the Blue Period (The Philipps Collection, Washington DC). Picasso – Painting the Blue Period Kenneth Brummel and Susan Behrends Frank, editors English Garden Eccentrics – Three hundred years of extraordinary groves, burrowings, mountains and menageries Todd Longstaffe-Gowan A history of death, Versions of King Lear, Poets of colour, etc 7 SOCIAL STUDIES 8 BIOGRAPHY 9 POLITICS 11 POEM 12 ECONOMICS JOE MORAN DANIEL BEER JULIUS KREIN ANNE NELSON JANA PRIKRYL DEIRDRE NANSEN MCCLOSKEY The Premonitions Bureau – A true story Sam Knight Exiles – Three island journeys William Atkins The Right – The hundred-year war for American conservatism Matthew Continetti The Dying Citizen – How progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of America Victor Davis Hanson. American Schism – How the two Enlightenments hold the secret to healing our nation Seth David Radwell New Apartments Time for Socialism – Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016– 2021 Thomas Piketty. A Brief History of Equality Thomas Piketty 13 RE-READING ANA ALICIA GARZA A spy, travelling as a journalist – James Agee in America, the ‘Kingdom of Might-Have-Been’ 14 ARTS ELIZABETH LOWRY PATRICIA A. MATTHEW Sibyl William Kentridge (Barbican) Sanditon (ITV, PBS). Bridgerton (Netflix) 16 FICTION MIRANDA SEYMOUR LINDSAY DUGUID HAL JENSEN LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN 18 LITERARY CRITICISM CARYL EMERSON The Chosen Elizabeth Lowry Mother’s Boy Patrick Gale Chilean Poet Alejandro Zambra; Translated by Megan McDowell Pollak’s Arm Hans von Trotha; Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer Eurasia without Borders – The dream of a leftist literary commons, 1919–1943 Katerina Clark. Internationalist Aesthetics – China and early Soviet culture Edward Tyerman 20 PSYCHOLOGY 21 CLASSICS 22 MIDDLE EAST 24 IN BRIEF DOUWE DRAAISMA BARBARA GRAZIOSI RAPHAEL CORMACK ROBERT IRWIN RUTH MICHAELSON The Rag and Bone Shop – How we make memories and memories make us Veronica O’Keane Homer – The very idea James I. Porter The Last Nahdawi – Taha Hussein and institution building in Egypt Hussam R. Ahmed Arabs and Arabists – Selected articles Alastair Hamilton Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller Nadia Wassef Lucid – A memoir of an extreme decade in an extreme generation Lucy Holden, etc 26 MEMOIRS 27 AFTERTHOUGHTS 28 NB JONATHAN BUCKLEY IRINA DUMITRESCU M. C. When the Dust Settles – Stories of love, loss and hope from an expert in disaster Lucy Easthope The art of improv – Wobbling through life English idioms, Everyman’s Library, Isabelle Huppert’s Orlando, Brooklyn’s prize problem Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LIBBY WHITE (libby.white@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk) Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk TLS MAY 6, 2022
page 3
A R T H I S T O R Y Living it large A master biographer and his rakish progress Y O R K N E W ( A R S ) , I E T Y S O C I G H T S R I S T S / A R T I C A S S O P P A B L O O F E S T A T E 2 0 2 2 © 1 9 2 7 I R E D A C Q U , I O N C O L L E C T I P S I L L P H T H E JAMES FENTON A LIFE OF PICASSO Volume VI: The minotaur years 1933–1943 JOHN RICHARDSON With the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga 320pp. Cape. £35. PICASSO Painting the Blue Period The Phillips Collection, Washington DC, until June 12 PICASSO Painting the Blue Period KENNETH BRUMMEL AND SUSAN BEHRENDS FRANK, EDITORS 336pp. Distributed Art Publishers. £44. ACERTAIN NOTORIETY, not to say a whiff of sulphur, hung about the late John Richardson. He liked to shock. But he only liked to shock if he himself was in perfect control of the timing and delivery of the shock. Then, he didn’t mince his words. One essay begins: “Most people who had dealings with Salvador Dalí’s Russian wife, Gala, would agree that to know her was to loathe her.” And he proceeds to make his case. Gala’s constant requirement, well into advanced old age, for sex with young men, led her to force her husband to churn out worthless works of art long after his trembling hand could no longer properly function. But one often notices with Richardson that he is careful not to get trapped in his own hyperboles. If there is something good to be said about one of MAY 6, 2022 his subjects, he always seems happy to concede a point. “No doubt about it,” the same essay continues, “[Gala] was one of the nastiest wives a major modern artist ever saddled himself with.” The double concession is swiftly made: Dalí was, or had been, a major modern artist (for about ten years, Richardson thought), and his predicament in old age was partly his fault. He had “saddled himself ” with Gala. There was a price. Well into his last years, Richardson was wonderful, wicked company. But he could be a fierce and unforgiving breaker-off of friendships, and he was prone to remember the slightest slight. Here he is, in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A memoir of Picasso, Provence and Douglas Cooper (1999) on the subject of the publisher George Weidenfeld: I have remained fond of George despite his occasional lapses of memory. For instance, in his memoir, Remembering My Good Friends, he describes me as “the son of a colonial official, educated at Westminster … [who] lived on his wits as a young man about town.” Whereas in fact my father was a soldier. I went to Stowe and the Slade School of Art and later earned my living first as an industrial designer, then as a journalist. How petty! one thinks. But Weidenfeld was not so vastly mistaken. In the same book Richardson himself tells us that his father was an army quartermaster-general in Africa, who went on to co-found the Army and Navy Store. The problem here is not the arcane question of how to refer to a quartermastergeneral (soldier or colonial official?). The unspoken offence is to refer to Richardson as one who “lived on his wits as a young man about town”. It sounds little short of libellous, as if Richardson were being remembered as a hustler. But that is precisely what many people thought he had been – a strikingly handsome and ambitious young man on the make. And that, indeed, is the picture we receive from TLS “The Blue Room” by Pablo Picasso, 1901 “A problem for Richardson, as his biography swelled to a scale surely not foreseen, must have been the bet he was making with his mortality James Fenton is the author of Leonardo’s Nephew: Essays on art and artists, 1998, and School of Genius: A history of the Royal Academy of Arts, 2006 an unexpected source, Angus Wilson’s novel, Hemlock and After (1952), in which the character of the stage designer Terence Lambert is based on Richardson. Terence is feeling washed up and desperate to make the connections he needs in order to advance his career, having “spivved along” as far as he can go. Of course, he says, “I can usually manage a tart’s holiday at Cannes or Ischia, but I’m twentyseven … and I must get settled”. He is prepared to enter an unsavoury relationship as a way of getting to know the right people. The real John Richardson took up with Douglas Cooper, a wealthy collector of early Cubist paintings. Cooper was famously pugnacious. His ferocity as an interrogator of prisoners of war had proved useful to the Allies in North Africa until the point when one of the subjects of his torture broke down, spilled the beans and hanged himself, causing Cooper in turn (for he had formed an amour for the young man) to break down. No doubt Richardson was unaware of the full story when he allowed himself to be taken under Cooper’s wing, but, he tells us, it was he who put the details together in due course. And he lived with Cooper for a dozen years. This sado-masochistic theme – the whiff of sulphur – stayed with Richardson’s reputation, by his design. His jokes on the subject were calculated to leave one uneasy. New York was a wonderful city, he said, because you can easily find a corpse at any time of the day or night. It was claimed that, in a moment of passion in a carriage in Central Park, New York, Richardson bit off his lover’s nose (they were splitting up). He would insist that, when staying at the Ritz in Madrid, one should demand a certain set of rooms where the traffic noise was loudest – handy, he said, for covering up the screams. On the walls of his drawing-room in Connecticut, he chose to display a series of Turkish prints “showing a variety of exotic tortures meted out to criminals in Constantinople”. Richardson’s early ambition was to write about art, which he did in a professional but unremarkable way. His mentors in this effort were Cooper and T. C. Worsley, then assistant literary editor of the New Statesman. In due course, however, Worsley’s influence waned, and Richardson began to feel that he had absorbed everything that Cooper could teach him. Indeed, he became critical of Cooper’s judgements. Not only that. Richardson had begun research on a book about Picasso’s development through his portraits. But the more his research progressed the more he began to see that a book about Picasso’s portraits would not do. It would have to be about Picasso’s wives and mistresses through their portraits. And then he saw that portraits of wives would not do – he would need to write a full-length biography, with a full cast of characters, many of whom he already knew. At around this time – not coincidentally – he began to stage his difficult escape from Douglas Cooper. One reason why the biography stretched to many volumes was that it needed to reflect Richardson’s fascination not only with the artist but with his circle of friends, wives and mistresses, and with the early dealers and collectors of his work. To me, Volume One will always be the part with the greatest allure, simply because the material is so seductive: the unfamiliar world of fin-de-siècle Barcelona with its attractive, homegrown version of Art Nouveau, the early struggles in Paris; Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein; the poor people of the streets, bars and cafes; the addicts and the suicides – the cast of the Blue Period. The earliest printed use of the term “peinture bleue” (Blue Painting, rather than Period) comes from an article by Apollinaire published in 1905. The style, in which the colour blue stood for unrelieved melancholy, was at first unpopular with the dealers and the market. Not without reason. There are many remarkable works from the period, among them the portrait of the procuress, “La Celestina”, the hieratic “Woman with a Fan” and the print “The Frugal Repast”, which reprises a theme of hunger and alcoholism well established in French 3

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C O N T E N T S

No. 6214

May 6 2022

the-tls.co.uk

UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T

Susan Owens Eccentric gardeners | Patricia A. Matthew Decoding costume drama Miranda Seymour Elizabeth Lowry’s Hardy | Joe Moran Premonitions of disaster

Portrait of the artist James Fenton on Picasso and his biographer

“Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Woman sitting on a chair)” by Pablo Picasso, 1941 © Henie Onstad Collection, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Photographer: Øystein Thorvaldsen. 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In this issue

The first three volumes of John Richardson’s bio- graphy of Picasso cover the artist’s life until the age of fifty. Richardson died three years ago, before he could complete the fourth, leaving it to his col- laborators, Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga, to end the narrative in 1943, when Picasso was sixty- one and keeping his head down in Nazi–occupied Paris. The artist still had another thirty years to live. But although his project is incomplete, Richardson’s gossipy but scholarly work looks built to last. The final volume captures the artistic decade in which Picasso painted “Guernica” (1937) and “Night Fish- ing at Antibes” (1939) and, as Richardson put it, “Picassified” a succession of wives and mistresses.

Richardson makes fruitful connections between Picasso’s life and his art: he records the artist’s “maîtresse en titre”, the surrealist photographer Dora Maar, turning to Catholicism after a particularly blue period with the artist, explaining that “After Picasso, there is only God”. James Fenton, the poet, critic and war correspondent, turns the tables on the biographer in his review of Richardson’s Life of Picasso: Volume Four. Fenton detects “a whiff of sulphur” about Richardson, centring on his twelveyear mutually exploitative relationship with Douglas Cooper, a wealthy collector who introduced him to Picasso’s adoring circle.

Richardson’s indiscretions are a gift to art critics. The characters in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics will doubtless inspire many imitators. Prominent among them is Sir Charles Isham, who introduced the gnome to English gardens in the 1860s, inspired by his travels in Germany. Isham populated his Northamptonshire estate with models of fairy miners, but our reviewer Susan Owens suggests he gave them a peculiarly English twist: “a militant group are captured on camera taking strike action in Sir Charles’s rockery”.

Are newspapers failing in invention these days? Sam Knight has written an account of a “Premonitions Bureau” set up in 1966 by the psychiatrist John Barker and Peter Fairley, a science journalist, with the blessing of Charles Wintour, editor of the Evening Standard. “For a year”, writes Joe Moran in his review of the book, “the newspaper’s readers would be asked to send in their forebodings of unwelcome events, which would be collated and then compared with actual events.”

Barker envisaged the Premonitions Bureau as a “central clearing house” for all portents of calamities, “a data bank for the nation’s dreams and visions”. The circumstances that led to the bureau’s closure were likely foreseen, too.

MARTIN IVENS

Editor

Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement

@the.tls @TheTLS

To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS,

go to shop.the-tls.co.uk

2

3 ART HISTORY

JAMES FENTON

4 HORTICULTURE

6 LETTERS TO THE

EDITOR

SUSAN OWENS

A Life of Picasso – The minotaur years 1933–1943 John Richardson; With the collaboration of Ross Finocchio and Delphine Huisinga. Picasso – Painting the Blue Period (The Philipps Collection, Washington DC). Picasso – Painting the Blue Period Kenneth Brummel and Susan Behrends Frank, editors

English Garden Eccentrics – Three hundred years of extraordinary groves, burrowings, mountains and menageries Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

A history of death, Versions of King Lear, Poets of colour, etc

7 SOCIAL STUDIES

8 BIOGRAPHY

9 POLITICS

11 POEM

12 ECONOMICS

JOE MORAN

DANIEL BEER

JULIUS KREIN ANNE NELSON

JANA PRIKRYL

DEIRDRE NANSEN MCCLOSKEY

The Premonitions Bureau – A true story Sam Knight

Exiles – Three island journeys William Atkins

The Right – The hundred-year war for American conservatism Matthew Continetti The Dying Citizen – How progressive elites, tribalism, and globalization are destroying the idea of America Victor Davis Hanson. American Schism – How the two Enlightenments hold the secret to healing our nation Seth David Radwell

New Apartments

Time for Socialism – Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016– 2021 Thomas Piketty. A Brief History of Equality Thomas Piketty

13 RE-READING

ANA ALICIA GARZA

A spy, travelling as a journalist – James Agee in America, the ‘Kingdom of Might-Have-Been’

14 ARTS

ELIZABETH LOWRY PATRICIA A. MATTHEW Sibyl William Kentridge (Barbican) Sanditon (ITV, PBS). Bridgerton (Netflix)

16 FICTION

MIRANDA SEYMOUR LINDSAY DUGUID HAL JENSEN LESLEY CHAMBERLAIN

18 LITERARY CRITICISM CARYL EMERSON

The Chosen Elizabeth Lowry Mother’s Boy Patrick Gale Chilean Poet Alejandro Zambra; Translated by Megan McDowell Pollak’s Arm Hans von Trotha; Translated by Elisabeth Lauffer

Eurasia without Borders – The dream of a leftist literary commons, 1919–1943 Katerina Clark. Internationalist Aesthetics – China and early Soviet culture Edward Tyerman

20 PSYCHOLOGY

21 CLASSICS

22 MIDDLE EAST

24 IN BRIEF

DOUWE DRAAISMA

BARBARA GRAZIOSI

RAPHAEL CORMACK ROBERT IRWIN RUTH MICHAELSON

The Rag and Bone Shop – How we make memories and memories make us Veronica O’Keane

Homer – The very idea James I. Porter

The Last Nahdawi – Taha Hussein and institution building in Egypt Hussam R. Ahmed Arabs and Arabists – Selected articles Alastair Hamilton Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller Nadia Wassef

Lucid – A memoir of an extreme decade in an extreme generation Lucy Holden, etc

26 MEMOIRS

27 AFTERTHOUGHTS

28 NB

JONATHAN BUCKLEY

IRINA DUMITRESCU

M. C.

When the Dust Settles – Stories of love, loss and hope from an expert in disaster Lucy Easthope

The art of improv – Wobbling through life

English idioms, Everyman’s Library, Isabelle Huppert’s Orlando, Brooklyn’s prize problem

Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LIBBY WHITE (libby.white@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)

Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com

The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk

TLS

MAY 6, 2022

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