My Copy of Vol. III of The Diary of Virginia Woolf
Extraordinarily it has taken me two years to write up this Volume Three of Virginia Woolf’s diary. Absurd, really. But here it is!
It is left to be said, as I have vowed before I do so again; with Volume Four encompassing the years 1931- 1935 (and to be started upon post haste!) I shall endeavor to be stringent and selective. But, believe me, with Woolf that is easier said than done. And, whilst ambition is a worthy trait, and a very Woolf-ish one at that, I dare not predict a time frame for the completion of this volume either!
In due course, it maybe that this year now ending will never ring with quite the foreboding of some during the last century; say, 1914 or 1933 or 1939 (or as they are so considered in retrospect rather than the lived experience of those years.) Certainly though, at the very least, 2022 will stand there in the annals as one defined by crises and disruptive influences. It may even turn out to be the year that is the pivot to a new world and economic order, a realignment of interests and expectations; and whether that will be for better or ill only time will tell.
In the short term, it is not to be denied that there are enough reasons to be found for a pessimistic outlook; climate catastrophes and their consequences, energy dependencies and their consequences, geopolitical turmoil – Russian aggression, mixed messaging from China, collective naval-gazing wherever one looks. But there is also cause for some optimism; a pandemic evolving to a manageable endemic state, signs of political and economic stability in the United States (relatively speaking!), indications of the “west” engaging with the “global south” with renewed energy (albeit born out of self-interest) and fresher ideas that go beyond mere words (and markets and profit margins!).
On a personal level, as this year ends, I admit to have well and truly run out of gas in the home stretch! Yes, yes, the pun is more than intended! What has plagued (!) me in the last weeks, I guess I will never now know. Enough to say, my bringing in of the New Year 2023 will be very quiet indeed and it is all I can do to resolve to get myself fit (in body and mind and soul) for all the fights that surely lay ahead; fuelled as they are by fires of discontent – ignited deep within where the narrative of each life resides, or fed from out there in an increasingly fractious world where the big stories are made to then settle as burden upon us all.
My own agenda and aspirations for 2023 are still being mulled over and will be written on in the next week or so.
Still a topic of contention and with new evidence surfacing a hundred years on; the excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922 by a team under the patronage of George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon and led by the Egyptologist Howard Carter. As I mentioned here in discussing the Rosetta Stone and other artifacts strewn far and wide, this, perhaps the most famous of all plunderings, also remains a matter of heated debate between the governments of Egypt and the United Kingdom.
Howard Carter and a foremen working on the innermost coffin.
The archaeological record of the excavation was bequeathed on Carter’s death to The Griffith Institute at Oxford University which provides for a comprehensive online resource – original documentation, photos, drawings. What of course it does not do is delve into the nitty gritty of questions of ownership and restitution.
As this BBC centenary year draws to a close, the Reith Lectures (inaugurated in 1948 and delivered by Bertrand Russell) remain a last highlight in an extraordinary year in broadcasting. Already recorded at different venues and before an audience, and with the first in the series airing this week on Radio 4, the lectures have in the past been (mostly always?) delivered by one person. This time, however, entitled The Four Freedoms – of Speech, of Worship, from Want and from Fear – the lectures are given by four individuals over four weeks: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rowan Williams, Darren McGarvey and Fiona Hill. The first two of these I am very well familiar with indeed – Adichie through her wonderful writing and her presence in the public forum and Williams as an Archbishop of Canterbury who may have left office but has not shied from public debate. McGarvey, is a young man who has fleetingly come to my attention in very recent times – not for the rapping (Loki) but for his generous and insightful exploration of the working class experience and poverty in Britain and Fiona Hill burst onto my radar a few years ago when she seriously came to blows with Trump and since has become an oft heard voice of expertise and clarity in respect to the global rise of autocratic and even fascist tendencies, Russian aggression and their war upon the Ukraine, and all the ensuing disruptions in foreign policy.
The contrarian side of my nature must emphatically state the obvious that the idea behind this series is far from original; steeped in 20th century American mythology, inspired as it is by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union speech. Delivered while war was raging in Europe and tensions rising in the Pacific, the speech focused on America’s national security interests and the threats to democracy being posed from within and beyond its borders, and indeed, by years end Pearl Harbor would be attacked and the United States would be at war. However noble Roosevelt’s words, the sentiments expressed remain just that – sentiments preached from the high western perch of possibilities. And the society he was speaking to or, at least, the segment for which he was interested, was another – best represented in Norman Rockwell’s 1943 depictions below in which these “four freedoms” apparently applied only to a very white, ‘conservative’ America. I can’t help wonder just a little that the BBC were unable to find inspiration a little closer to home.
Freedom of SpeechFreedom of WorshipFreedom of WantFreedom of FearThe Four Freedoms, Norman Rockwell, 1943
Enough diversion – the four voices to be heard this year will hopefully catapult us into the here and now! First up on Wednesday, and the one I most look forward to, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking on Freedom of Speech. In The Guardian today there is a sort of interview and a bit of a taster; also reminding me of her first appearance on the “world stage” so to speak in a TED Talk way back in 2009 (!) – 18 minutes … and 32 million odd views I now see! – that I revisit gladly below.
On a number of occasions recently I have searched for an update on Salman Rushdie’s condition following the brutal attack upon him at a literary event in rural New York in the summer just gone – and mostly have came up short. His (super)agent, Andrew Wylie, did divulge the extent of Rushdie’s injuries, which include the loss of an eye, during an El País interview – reported upon here at The Guardian.
Now, and without having to take the initiative, on Radio Four’s Today programme this morning, Mishal Husain spoke with Alan Yentob, a long time friend of Salman Rushdie (at about 2:19:00 – usually available for about 30 days). We are told that very recently Rushdie has “listened in” at a couple of special readings of his works by friends and colleagues, amongst them Yentob, who says that Rushdie is working hard at getting well, that he remains optimistic and his humor as razor sharp as ever.
Very good news indeed.
And … his new book, called Victory City, finished before he sustained such dreadful injuries is due out in February 2023. Yentob actually said January, but I have checked at Penguin Random House and it is indeed February 7 in the US and February 9 in the UK. From what Yentob says and following the publisher’s blurb we will be taken back anew to Rushdie’s literary roots in a magical, mystical, shape shifting India – this time to the 14th century and to the tale of a little girl possessed by a powerful goddess and sent on a divine mission to guide the fate of a great city and expose and conquer the patriarchy. A mission that will span centuries, and be interwoven with the city’s rise and fall and with it that of its rulers and its citizens.
Now if that doesn’t sound like the Salman Rushdie that gave usMidnight’s Children – who could believe it! – forty odd years ago.
With the regularity in which people, ideas, situations intersect in my readings and observations, I have often been taken aback. That, perhaps, the blessing – or the curse – of being widely informed! Regrettably; not deeply, rather tending to the shallow.
A case in point:
In David Edmonds’ book about the Vienna Circle that I have written on in the previous post, there is an examination of the difficulties many of its members had as they sought refuge from the Nazi terror that was taking over much of the Continent. Therein quoted were some fragments of correspondence between Karl Popper and Austin Duncan-Jones, Professor of Philosophy at Birmingham [pp 240-242 in the German edition read by me], in which the former was invited there as a guest lecturer.
The Shakespearean scholar, Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones, died in October. This I noted with sadness, not because I know her work – for which I am sorry because her ‘hatchet job’ on William S. – his character that is – sounds terrific and original – but because I know her to be the mother of Emily Wilson – and that means an awful lot.
The point is: I wondered about the name. And, lo and behold, the first mentioned Prof. Duncan-Jones is the father of the second said.
And all this means? Professors of Philosophy beget those of Literature beget those of Classics? Perhaps. Or that an academic career in the UK has, or once had, an awful lot to do with family and class? I don’t know. Mostly, just a very interesting generational chain of circumstance and one from which, in this familial instance, very many have benefited – and continue to.
The death of Prof. Duncan-Jones was reported upon by some of the more culturally attentive British media and noted by me in a Twitterthread (begun by Bee Wilson and retweeted by Emily), and The New York Times has now run an obituary.
The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle – by David Edmonds.
An immensely interesting book just read in German translation. What begins as a lively intellectual romp of the highest niveau ends – as one always knows it will – in animosity and some enmity, in flight and exile and the tragedy of war and the holocaust and, for one, in his murder.
written by David Edmonds, pub. C.H. Beck (2021)
The Vienna Circle was a group of scientists and philosophers that formed in the first decades of the 20th century; meeting and publishing regularly in changing constellations and degrees of exclusivity, united by a shared antipathy to the metaphysical zeitgeist and in search of a more stringentphilosophy of science based on modern logic (inspired firstly by Ernst Mach and later by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus) and an empirical methodology (finding fulfillment only under the stringency of verificationism) – to become known as logical empiricism. Their ranks included people like: Otto Neurath, Philipp Frank, Kurt Gödel, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann …and, yes, Moritz Schlick … And in their orbit: Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, Alfred Tarski …. Many were political, many Jewish or with Jewish associations of some sort and to various degrees.
pub. Princeton University Press, 2020
As the people, so not the place. It is an irony of fate (and for some just a matter of birth), that this exquisite group of argumentative rational thinkers should congregate in Vienna, a place that by the 1930s was being increasingly consumed by unreason, as the dark shadows of nationalism and antisemitism fell about them – from within and soon from without with the Anschluß into the German Reich in 1938. Edmonds’ book distinguishes itself in its conjuring of the growing atmosphere of, first, disquiet and then angst, often illustrated through vignettes surrounding the main players and their complicated and sometimes compromised situations.
Women don’t get the short shrift by Edmonds either. Notable is the tenacity of Rose Rand (born in Lemberg – now Lviv), as a young woman actively participating within the ‘circle’ (including the writing of protocols) during the early thirties as Austria imploded, sometimes helped and sometimes hindered in her émigré status as she struggled to keep her ambitions alive – making ends meet mostly through teaching and translating the works of others – first in England and then the United States where she died – alone, as she seems to have been most of her life – in 1980.
Rose Rand, 1949.Susan Stebbing, 1939.Tess Simpson
Rand didn’t leave Austria until 1939 and it was then – or so it is presumed- with the assistance of another woman: the philosophy professor Susan Stebbing. As apparent by the fore linked SEP entry, she, a formidable intellect who made major contributions to analytical philosopher – and an argumentative voice in the logical positivism debate.
And then there is the remarkable Tess Simpson. As the long time secretary of the Academic Assistance Council (AAC) and its successor the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL), Simpson was instrumental in helping many of the Vienna Circle (amongst many others) find safe haven. [This organization continues their work to this day as Council for At-Risk Academics (CARA)] David Edmonds has previously written on Simpson for The Jewish Chroniclehere, and his 2017 Radio 4 documentary, “Miss Simpson’s Children” is (as I write) still available.
For me, alone an introduction to these three women made this book a wonderful read. But there is, of course, so much more.
Each aerial view of each mini-cavalcade of darkened Land Rovers led by outriders in royal blue and luminous yellow brings one near to all that topography of land clustered tight, then precisely coded, within the celebrated London environs of SW1; compressed there within its borders all the ruling powers of a kingdom.
The Postcodes Project – SW1: Belgravia, Brompton, Millbank, Pimlico, St James’s, Victoria, Westminster
A neck of the woods that I know well, albeit from from the vantage point of another SW (storied also but where real people live – or once lived) and from halcyon days long gone, but few I would say have ever journeyed these fabled routes, either actually or on the wings of imagination, as many have done in most recent times gone – as the late summer of 2022 turns to autumn, as a monarch departs the mortal world and another ascends to her place, as a Prime Minister goes and another comes, and as a Prime Minister goes and another comes. I am not repeating myself! Blink and history was there just waiting to be missed.
On Thursday, after 44 (!) days in office, Liz Truss announced her resignation, and today this found its formal conclusion in the requisite audience with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace and, shortly thereafter, Rishi Sunak, the newly elected [sic] leader of the Conservative Party, being invited by the King to be his Prime Minister.
From memory: After the wheels finally fell off Boris Johnson’s government at the beginning July, a convoluted process for the leadership of the Tories began with the whittling down to two contenders – Truss and … yes, Sunak! – and continued through the summer with a series of so-called “hustings”. Sunak was favored by conservative parliamentarians and Truss by Party members and, yes, the latter trumped the former. Two days after receiving Johnson and Truss (not in SW1, but Balmoral – for reasons which were sadly to become clear) and doing that which the monarch is anointed to do, the Queen died. Granted, an interrupted start extraordinaire but then Truss seemed to tout the powers of disruption. All very well, one could say, but did she not know that in times of global crisis markets and their makers crave at least the promise of stability. In a matter of weeks a complete economic framework, misguidedly constructed on a toxic mix of low taxes and high borrowing lay in shambles, and with it Liz Trusses job and reputation.
And so it was, this time round, in just a few days, and with Boris Johnson returning with fanfare from a Caribbean jaunt, the Tories heaped on the wearied Brits another leadership “election”! More skillfully modified this time round, with a set of rules that would, with any luck and some reason, circumvent interference from pesky Members. And in the end, so it did: Bojo knew when to fold, as did, albeit at the last moment, another penny pretender (called Mordaunt), and Rishi Rich was left holding the winning hand. Like democracy is a game of poker!
On Rishi Sunak, putting aside the politics, it should be said that he is the first Prime Minister from an ethnic background (okay, there is the Disraeli exception – not quite the same thing I would suggest) – his parents, of Punjabi descent, migrated to the UK from eastern Africa in the 1960s; married to the daughter of an Indian tech. billionaire (with modest beginnings); a practicing Hindu. In other words, a biography, irrespective of the advantages granted to him by good fortune, and fortune, that only a very few years ago would have made a rise to the highest echelons of power almost inconceivable. Meritocracy sometimes works it seems. A remarkable story in many respects, and that Sunak’s success should correspond with Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light, and in this year that remembers the end of the Raj and the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, is highly symbolic and one of those strange quirks of fate.
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