A Christmas Cracker

Readers who are not disarmed
already by this year's Christ-
mas Cracker from the Mayfair
bookshop, Heywood Hill, are
welcomed to revisit previous
seasons of its writer's wis-
dom, here. The post is bound
to reach us all eventually,
with mirth of 5th Form rib-
aldry, from the perspective
of a very well-traveled ton-
gue in cheek. His Sicily, A
Short History was our runner-
up as book of the year, and
would have won, if the men-
aces commingled in its sub-
title held a candle to the
winner's merry tribe. Alas, 
mere gangsterism is not e-
nough in times of high re-
ligious dudgeon, to Cruz 
our barren dungeon as a lad-
der day saint, which is not 
the same thing (in any way)
as Gérard's rehearsal for a 
redeeming ladder day upon 
the earth. Somebody's always 
campaigning above his rank.

Each day I hesitate to

turn the key in my post

office box, in hope of

my Cracker's arrival, is

a day precariously rele-

gated to my own imagina-

tion. Mine can only wan-

der in this season, to

Norwich's adopted Venice,

and we know why: for the

perfection of the perman-

ence of its permeability,

often construed as peril.

Expecting my Cracker, I'd

cite another traveler on

this necessary principle,

with an eye for simile we

value so much in Norwich,

in whom a spree of mis-

chief always bares a sim-

ple offer of delight, un-

campaigned as an embrace.

Merry wishes, in all the

ways we truly wish them.

        The music subsides; its twin, however, has risen,

        you discover upon stepping outside - not signif-

        icantly, but enough for you to feel reimbursed for 

        the faded chorale. For water, too, is choral, in

        more ways than one. It is the same water that car-

        ried the Crusaders, the merchants, St Mark's rel-

        ics, Turks, every kind of cargo, military or plea-

        sure vessel; above all, it reflected everybody who

        ever lived, not to mention stayed, in this city,

        everybody who ever strolled or waded its streets

        in the way you do now.

        Small wonder that it looks muddy green in the day-

        time and pitch black at night, rivaling the firma-

        ment .. It really does look like musical sheets,

        frayed at the edges, constantly played, coming to

        you in tidal scores, in bars of canals with innum-

        erable obbligati of bridges, mullioned windows, or

        curved crownings of Coducci cathedrals, not to men-

        tion the violin necks of gondolas.

Joseph Brodsky

Watermark

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992©

John Julius Norwich

  (né Cooper)

Sicily

  A Short History from the

  Ancient Greeks to Cosa Nostra

John Murray, 2015©

Hanky-panky in the book of the year

I realize, I am offering a

nomination too late to max

out its sale, but the book

of my year would not, in a

town with our pity, draw a

large audience, anyway. It

is Nick Stargardt's second

popular history of the war

in Europe, 1939-1945, from

the perspective of Germany

- a ringside seat, if ever

there were one.

For readers in this field,

The German War, adorned as

it is, by not one, but two

whole subtitles, makes for

necessary reading, even if

some will find it disturb-

ingly familiar.

Some years ago, in another

publishing house, our Nick

brought forth Witnesses of

War, with no more than one

subtitle; but the book won

attention, deservedly. Af-

ter Rossellini (Year Zero) 

and Grass (Tin Drum), some

historian of childhood was

bound to write of Germany.

It was very well done, and

I'm a little surprised, to

have omitted mentioning it.

But who knew, that in this

new text, I would have the

chance to praise the first?

     I think we all understand, when a guy repeats himself in a long political campaign. We tolerate these regurgitations as the stump speech, the spiel that would simply be ungenerous not to be sure we were fed. We know the refrain in song, we know the prior work's return, in footnotes or selected quotations, on the same page or in an appendix. How often do we appreciate, in fact, the trail-blazing provenance in an anthology's list of prior publication, to say nothing of the convenience of corralling Trevor-Roper between two covers? What we sort of don't like to think we might undergo, is the word-for-word redumping of entire blocks of text, from the copyright of Knopf, 2005, to that of Basic Books in 2015, without so much as a wave of the referring hand, an admission in the introduction, an assertion of right on the title page.

     It isn't that we're finicky. But of course it's one thing, for a guy to steal from himself, and something else, to adduce the same tissue of words to represent a different investigation. Is there so little connection between the work of selection and statement of evidence for A, that selection and statement can be abandoned as a warfare accomplished for B, ever after? I don't suggest laziness in this, I wonder about the risk of critical lethargy; and I certainly don't care, that he holds an Oxford chair. Some of our neediest cases did the same.

     The thrust of the book for Knopf was the description of the diversity of suffering of children under the Nazis in Germany and in the East. The thrust of the book for Basic is how Germans, self-identified as subjects of the regime, conducted their lives and sustained their minds in that same period. The Germans were Germans in both books; but they were miles apart in identity, under these two distinct vantage points.

     What are the conditions of the evidence, swapped from this burner, when evolved on that burner, without the same predicate, the same seasoning, the same destiny? What on earth is the structure of discussion doing, playing musical chairs with suggestive fragments? The risk in fiction, we recognize as blinding; but is this because we distrust fiction? Or do we hold history in worse contempt? In both, something greater than narrative elegance is at stake. Interpretation and judgment travel very, very badly when they change trains without notice. That is not a politician's redundancy. That is diagnostic mayhem, in any thought involving words.

     And this is regrettable, because a book doesn't rise to this level of consideration without extraordinary felicities. Stargardt's hunger to understand shines through his haste to explain, and for me - guardedly, but decidedly - this instinct closes gaps that his own weaknesses might open. For readers in this field, no return to it can be undertaken with pleasure, but it can be rewarded. The reward in this extremely humane book rises to a par with literature which really is implicit in the conduct of history. We think it strange, to be exemplary despite contradiction. But it is not strange at all, if you were German, and this were 1942. And we are not strange. 

     We just have an alarming politics. To endure its infinitely fatuous assertions of common sense, its grotesque temptations to excess, its monstrously vulgar seductions to force, a little leavening in history's registry of experience is not amiss. This citation comes from page 210 of the book of the year. It had 360 more pages to go:

     The farmer's son confessed to his diary in order 'to

     keep a balance of my life, to consider what is right 

     and wrong and to keep perspective'. Fumbling in the

     cold to get the words down, Albert Joos concluded,

     'Very rarely are people subjected in their lives to

     such brutalisation [Verrohung] and forced to live in

     such primitive conditions .. the continual lying in

     wait for the enemy, in order to do him in at any op-

     portunity, that lets one become properly harsh [roh]'.

     Existential fear now turned Nazi propaganda about

     Jewish-Bolshevism, treacherous civilians and danger-

     ous partisans into common sense. However nagging the

     lingering scruples of individuals, who recognised 

     with distaste how 'hard', 'harsh', 'brutal' and

     'coarse' they had become, the collective self-trans-

     formation of the eastern front was complete.

Nicholas Stargardt

Professor of European

  History, Magdalen

Witnesses of War

  Children's Lives under

  the Nazis

  Cf., Klaus Seidel's story,

  pp. 229-231

Alfred A. Knopf, 2005©

The German War

  A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945

  Citizens and Soldiers

  Cf., Klaus Seidel's story

  pp. 366-368

Basic Books, 2015©

Kurt Masur, for music

My everyday memory of Kurt Masur,
who died in Greenwich the other
day, is based on luminous analog
recordings of Beethoven, meticul-
ously pressed in Japan. But my
primary memory is shared by mil-
lions; and my dearest memory, by
possibly a few hundred San Fran-
ciscans who heard him conduct
Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra,
rather less in front of us than
from within us.

Absolutely no one who lived an-
xiously through the swift demise
of the postwar division of Ger-
many, will forget Masur's exer-
cise of immense cultural pres-
tige as director of the Gewand-
haus, in demanding humane treat-
ment of East German citizens
then assembling for their free-
dom; in his patient call for dia-
logue, between the belatedly col-
lapsing government, and a people
he participated in leading from
unimaginable imprisonments.

But there was nothing in this
public intervention, that bore
an element unembodied in the
stupefying warmth of tone he
extracted from this Orchestra.
We loved that instrument, and 
we drew our own hopes from it. 
It is one of the intricately
accidental evolutions of German
culture, and has been one of its
most exacting proving grounds,
since before Félix Mendelssohn
undertook its leadership, as an 
assimilated Jew.

Who can be surprised to know,
he was responsible for the re-
invigoration of the New York
Philharmonic? Who can wonder,
that his guest conducting vis-
its to San Francisco were in-
stantly sold out? 

After conducting the Gewand-
haus that night in San Fran-
cisco, Kurt Masur unaccount-
ably found himself not seized
by one of the city's aggres-
sive hostesses, and strolled
across the street to a little
pizzeria called, Spuntino. I
could not believe my eyes as
he strode in with 2 or 3 as-
sociates, to stand in line to
order an after-concert bite 
to eat. I could not resist 
requesting his autograph. 


You know it well - the swirl-
ing, weeping fog that late; 
yellow, looming lamps of elec-
tric buses, the silence of the
cruising Jags, the belches of
the Porsches. Guys in baseball 
collars, watching limo's doub-
le-park. But, too, a tautening 
line of music, in chills that 
shouldn't soothe, but are our
beaker of refreshment, beneath
lights that flicker on.

Like a kid at the ball park, 
I shivered to offer thanks.
I don't recall that I slept
that night, and I'm sure, I
didn't mind.

Jack Hurrell
  

"How do you shave in there?"

Audrey Hepburn cornered
Cary Grant in a Paris
hotel lift and finally
got to the bottom of
one of the great impon-
derables of American
cinema, in Stanley Don-
en's farcical thriller,
Charade (1963). I went
to see the movie with
a Dartmouth freshman
in my curiously end-
less rôle as a younger
sibling, not yet of the
shaving class, myself.

By the time of his

commencement, my in-

terest was no longer

academic, as I had

crossed the hirsute

frontier, yet still

not into the land of

road trips to the near-

est licensed premises.

Oh, I might tag along.

I even learned the cus-

tom of the determined

drive, to the nearest

place like Vassar.

But there was a frontier toward which no curiosity conducted me, toward which I really didn't venture. I saw it as a chore I could just as easily postpone. I don't mean to claim any profit by this flat procrastination, except to say that it strangely spared me any pang of abstinence. I had no sense of doing, anything; I had no sense of not doing, anything - but of course, this doesn't mean I was being very bright. Nor if it did mean anything, even to this day I could not responsibly say, it could mean only one thing. In all events, it did mean, I did not meet my Audrey Hepburn, until she was brought into my eating club as my friend's romance.

They still make fron-

tiers, I find; and I

have learned to take

them with a merrier

anticipation. Not with

any better perception,

nor with much advance

in method. But there

are pictures, to this

day, which can show an

edge or two to make

one smile, even about

oneself. Still, I know

never to expect obser-

vation to be welcomed 

as anything better than 

spying, without rever- 

ing farce.

Stanley Donen
  director, producer
Peter Stone
  screenplay
Charade
Universal, 1963©

Robbie Beeser

Road guys
Georgia, Caucasus
Joonas Parviainen

Model for Damir Doma
Paris

Blond at border
Germany
Joonas Paraviainen

Ombra mai fu

Georg Friderich Händel

Serse

  Ombra mai fu

1738

Sir Roger Norrington

Orchestra of the Age

  of Enlightenment

David Daniels

  counter-tenor

1998

Snøhetta
Operahuset
Oslo
2008

Joonas Parviainen