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Julian Barnes: A Portrait of Lucian Freud Peter Pomerantsev: Sistema Deborah Friedell: Amazons Irresistible Rise Thomas Laqueur: Wrong Turn in Sarajevo Joanna Biggs: Short Cuts Michael Wood: At the Movies Marina Warner: At Camden Arts Centre Letters Table of contents

Heart-Squasher
Julian Barnes
BuyMan with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford Thames and Hudson, 248 pp, 12.95, March 2012, ISBN 978 0 500 28971 6 BuyBreakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist by Geordie Greig Cape, 260 pp, 25.00, October, ISBN 978 0 224 09685 0 Rembrandts Artist in His Studio, c.1629, is a small picture with a blazing message. The viewpoint is that of one seated on the bare floor in the corner of an attic studio with crumbling plaster walls. On the right, in shadow, is the doorway. In the centre, with its back to us, is an enormous easel with a picture propped on it. On the left, barely half the height of the easel, stands the painter, brush and mahlstick in hand, dressed in his painting robe and hat. He is in shadow, but we can roughly make out his moon face as he stares at his picture. The light source, out of shot, is to the left of him and above. It falls almost entirely on the floorboards, turning them corn-coloured, and also on the left-hand edge of the painting on the easel, giving it a glittering vertical line. But because we cant see where the light is coming from, the image switches round in our head: it is as if the painting is blazing out over the floor (but not onto the manikin-painter). So we are to understand: it is the art which illuminates, which gives the artist both his being and his significance, rather than the other way round. Lucian Freud made the same point once with a brilliant aside. Any words which might come out of his mouth concerning his art, he remarked, are about as relevant to that art as the noise a tennis player produces when playing a shot. He wrote one article for Encounter at the very start of his career in 1954, and at the very end added a few sentences to it for Tatler in 2004. (His view of art had not changed in the fifty-year interval.) Otherwise he kept textual silence. He issued no manifestos and gave no press interviews until his final decade. All this through a period when artists took over the colour supplements, and the easel painter seemed vieux jeu compared to the collager, silkscreener, installer, conceptualist, video-maker, performer, neon-signer and stone-arranger. There was much art babble, and newcomers were expected to provide credos of fluent obscurity. Flaubert once said: The more words

there are on a gallery wall next to a picture, the worse the picture. Flaubert also said, in reply to a journalistic inquiry about his life, I have no biography. The art is everything; its creator nothing. Freud, who used to read aloud to his girlfriends from Flauberts letters, and portrayed the writer Francis Wyndham with a battered but recognisable copy of the first volume of the Belknap edition in his fist, would have agreed. But having no biography is impossible: the nearest you can get is to have no published biography in your own lifetime. Freud, more than any other artist of his stature, came as close to that as possible. In the 1980s, an unauthorised biographer started delving, only to find heavies at his door, advising him to desist. A decade later, Freud authorised a biography and co-operated on it, but when he read the typescript and realised what biography entailed, he paid the writer off. He lived furtively, moving between addresses, never filling in a form (and hence never voting), rarely giving out his telephone number. Those close to him knew that silence and secrecy were the price of knowing him. On Capri they show you the sheer cliff from which those who displeased the Emperor Tiberius were reportedly flung (though the Capresi, who call him by the softer name of Timberio, insist that the death toll was much exaggerated by muck-rakers like Suetonius). The court of Freud was similarly absolutist in its punishments: if you displeased him by bad timekeeping, unprofessionalism, or disobedience to his will you were tossed over the cliff. In the painting which shows Wyndham flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his long-time assistant David Dawson. But the baby had not caused offence, so was not painted out, with the result that a naked and strangely breasted Dawson is now seen feeding the child. Freuds American dealer assumed the picture would be unsellable; it was bought by the first American client he showed it to.

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Penelope Fitzgerald thought the world divided into exterminators and exterminatees. Certainly it divides into controllers and controllees. A typical controllee is someone who is love-dependent; Freud was that once, and swore never to be so again. He was always a controller, and sometimes an exterminator. Martin Gayford and Geordie Greigs accounts of Freuds behaviour reminded me at times of two unlikely novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amiss second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven oclock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, Bunny, do you have to have a drink? He replied (and it was a reply that would have fitted a vast number of other exchanges): Look, Im Kingsley Amis, you see, and I can drink whenever I want. As for Simenon, he practised two things obsessively: his art and fucking (though his speed at writing contrasts with Freuds slowness at painting). Simenon once winningly observed: Maybe I am not completely crazy, but I am a psychopath. Freud confessed his megalomania to Gayford, adding that there was a bit of his mind that believes, just possibly, my things are the best by anyone, ever. Amis, Simenon and Freud all had controlling, interfering mothers, which may or may not be relevant. Freud always lived a high-low life: dukes and duchesses and royalty and posh girlfriends on one hand, gangsters and bookies on the other. The middle classes were generally scorned or ignored. He also had high-low manners: unfazed and relaxed in royal circles, a stickler for good manners from his children, but also indelibly rude and aggressive. He did whatever he liked, whenever he liked, and expected others to go along with it. His driving made Mr Toad look like a nervous learner. He would assault people without warning or, often, excuse. As a refugee child he would hit his English schoolfellows because he didnt understand their language; as an octogenarian he was still getting into fistfights in supermarkets. He once assaulted Francis Bacons lover because the lover had beaten up Bacon, which was quite the wrong response: Bacon was furious because he was a masochist and liked being beaten up. Freud would write poison postcards, vilely offensive letters, and threaten to have people duffed up. When Anthony dOffay closed a show of his two days early, an envelope of shit arrived through dOffays letterbox. In one version of the philosophy of the self, we all operate at some point on a line between the twin poles of episodicism and narrativism. The distinction is existential, not moral. Episodicists feel and see little connection between the different parts of their life, have a more fragmentary sense of self, and tend not to believe in the concept of free will. Narrativists feel and see constant connectivity, an enduring self, and acknowledge free will as the instrument which forges their self and their connectedness. Narrativists feel responsibility for their actions and guilt over their failures; episodicists think that one thing happens, and then another thing happens. Freud in his personal life was as pure an example of an episodicist as you are likely to get. He always acted on impulse; he describes himself as egotistical but not in the least introspective. Asked if he felt guilt about always being an absentee father to his large number of children, he replied, None at all. When Freuds son Ali, who was angered by his fathers massive absence, later apologised in case his own behaviour had caused his father anxiety, Freud replied: Thats nice of you to say, but it doesnt work like that. There is no such thing as free will people just have to do what they have to do. He was a reader of Nietzsche, who thought us all pieces of fate. His episodicism applied to such varied matters as the weather (his favourite being Irish, which comes in many unpredictable forms each day) and grief (I hate mourning and all that kind of thing Ive never done it). He thought the idea of an afterlife utterly ghastly perhaps because such a contrivance would prove narrativism. Not surprisingly, narrativists tend to find episodicists selfish and irresponsible; while episodicists tend to find narrativists boring and bourgeois. Happily (or confusingly), in most of us these tendencies overlap. Though each new painting may be seen as a furiously concentrated episode, every artist can and must also be a narrativist, can and must see how one brushstroke is connected to the next, and how each has a consequence; how past is connected to present, and present to future, and how there is an unfolding story in any painting, which is largely the result of the application of free will. And also that, beyond this, there is a wider narrative: of selfinstruction, of real or imagined progress, of an artistic career. Gayfords Man with a Blue Scarf is a narrative of a single episode: his seven-month sitting for the picture of his title. Structured like a journal, with each entry amounting to a kind of brushstroke, it is one of the best books about art, and the making of art, that I have ever read. While Freud studies Gayford, Gayford studies Freud; as the portrait builds on the easel, so it does in the text. The actual process of posing Gayford wittily describes as somewhere between transcendental meditation and a visit to the

barbers. But he has fallen into the chair of the most demanding haircutter. Invited to make himself comfortable, he sits with his right leg crossed over his left, and the artistic process begins. After an hour or so, a break is called, there is already a charcoal outline of Gayfords head on the canvas, and Freud flops down on one of the piles of rags that litter his studio. When Gayford returns to his chair he asks if he is allowed to cross left leg over right. Absolutely not, Freud replies, because it would subtly alter the angle of the head. And you would certainly have to take his word for that. Gayford, whose portrait was begun in November, also found himself lumbered with his heavy tweed jacket and scarf as the sittings dragged on into the following summer. Freud never used professional models, but demanded professional obedience from his amateurs. Everything was on his terms, even when the sitter was a fellow painter. David Hockney calculated that he sat for Freud for more than a hundred hours over four months; in reciprocation, Freud gave Hockney two afternoons.

David Hockney (2002) Gayford provides an intense account of an intense process, of how art is made by a mixture of instinct and control, eye and brain, of nerves, doubt and constant correction. He describes Freuds way of muttering and chuntering away as he works (Yes, perhaps a bit, Quite!, No-o, I dont think so, A bit more yellow), his sighing and pausing, irritation at a mistake and triumphant waving of the brush at the conclusion of a successful stroke. In such constant self-commentary he resembles not so much that plosive tennis player but the cricketer Derek Randall (formerly of Nottinghamshire and England), who would chunter away to himself throughout an innings, constantly encouraging and rebuking himself between shots (and using his appropriately Freudian nickname of Rags). Gayford is also funny and honest about what a sitter goes through the excitement, the shameful vanities (he worries about his ear hair) and the discomfort and boredom. A large side-reward is the pleasure and value (the more so for an art critic) of Freuds high-quality table talk and easel talk. There is good gossip about his life and times, and Freud talks freely about his ambitions and procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velsquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesnt: da Vinci (Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just the worst of the Pre-Raphaelites (Burne-Jones breathes a sigh of relief), but the nearest painting can get to bad breath. Freud was always a painter of the Great Indoors. Even his horses are painted at home in their stables; and though he curated a great Constable show in Paris in 2003, the greenery he depicted himself lived either in pots or was visible

curated a great Constable show in Paris in 2003, the greenery he depicted himself lived either in pots or was visible from a studio window. His subject matter was entirely autobiographical. Verdi once said that to copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better. Freud didnt invent, nor did he do allegory; he was never generalising or generic; he painted the here and now. He thought of himself as a biologist just as he thought of his grandfather Sigmund as an eminent zoologist, rather than a psychoanalyst. He disliked art that looks too much like art, paintings which were suave, or which rhymed, or sought to flatter either the subject or the viewer, or displayed false feeling. He never wanted beautiful colours in his work, and cultivated an aggressive antisentimentality. When there is more than one figure in a picture, each is separate, isolated: whether one is reading Flaubert and the other is breastfeeding, or whether both are naked on a bed together. There is only contiguity, never interaction. He greatly admired Chardins The Young Schoolmistress which most would see as one of the tenderest (and most beautifully coloured) images of human interaction; Freud liked it mainly because the schoolmistress had the best-painted ear in the history of art. He admired jokiness in a painter, finding it in Goya, Ingres and Courbet; though his own attempts at jokiness rarely come off. For all his intelligence, when Freud has an idea in a painting, it is usually a bad and clunky one. The naked woman with two halves of a hard-boiled egg in the foreground (woman womb eggs; woman breasts nipples yolks) is crass and juvenile. Painter and Model shows a clothed Celia Paul with her brush pointing at the models penis, while her naked right foot squeezes paint out of a tube on the floor. This makes the visual double entendres in James Bond movies look sophisticated. Early on, he painted with a Memling-like precision, each hair and eyelash clearly delineated, with a light palette and a (comparatively) gentle eye. Then, switching from sable to hoghair, his brushwork grew broader, his tones dunner and greener, his canvases larger; some of his sitters grew larger too, culminating in the enormous Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley the benefits supervisor (perhaps the most famous fat woman since Two-Ton Tessie OShea). Freud liked to emphasise his own incorrigibility, his instinct to do the opposite of what he was told to do; and several times in interviews he ascribed this major stylistic switch to being praised for the drawing which was the basis of his painting. So he decided to stop drawing and to paint more loosely. This explanation seems hardly credible, given his admiration for great draughtsmen like Ingres and Rembrandt. Further, no artist as serious as Freud, however contrarian he might be, would allow himself to be stylistically controlled by (even favourable) criticism. But the explanation draws attention away from the truer reason, which he also admitted: the influence of Francis Bacon. Freud lived his life instinctively, but painted with utter control; Bacon outdid him by seeming to paint instinctively, and at speed, with no preliminary drawing, occasionally finishing a picture in a morning. Some found Freuds stylistic switch alarming, or worse that that: Kenneth Clark, an early admirer, wrote to Freud suggesting that he was deliberately suppressing what made his work remarkable. I never saw him again, Freud tells Gayford. Another one off the Tiberian cliff. This looser brushwork did not lead to any greater speed of work (though Freud was never to threaten the record 12 years Ingres took to paint Madame Moitessier). But it changed the way he portrayed flesh. From now on, as Gayford notes, even when he painted the young and smooth-skinned, he included in it the fleshs vulnerability, its potential to sag and wither. Some thought hed been doing that all along. Caroline Blackwood, writing about Freuds portraits in the New York Review of Books in 1993, described them as prophecies rather than snapshots of the sitter as physically captured in a precise historical moment. She added that his paintings of her had left her dismayed, while others were mystified why he needed to paint a girl, who at that point still looked childish, as so distressingly old. Blackwood had much cause for resentment against her former husband (not least that he had slept with her teenage daughter), but this accusation seems misplaced. If we look at the Blackwood portraits now, it is more her anxiety and fragility that strike us, rather than any premature ageing. Gayford thinks Freuds second style is all about mortality. In the self-portraits, he writes, Freud seizes almost gleefully on signs of ageing and time; and his attitude to other sitters is in this way the same as his attitude to himself. Perhaps; but I wonder if it isnt more a question of style and brushwork than of a not very subtle message about mortality. This is the method Freud uses in his quest to intensify the sitters nature and essence, whether he is painting the naked young or the fully clothed octogenarian Queen of England. As for Freuds many self-portraits, it is less their gleefully depicted decay that is striking than their selfcelebration, their implicit stance of artist as hero. The worst is The Painter Surprised by a Naked Admirer, one of Freuds ideas pictures. It shows a naked model on a bare studio floor clinging to Freuds ankle and thigh, as if to prevent him getting to his easel. Its intention may be jokey, but the result is both arch and vain. And perhaps it also doesnt work because it is a rare attempt at showing interaction rather than contiguity.

doesnt work because it is a rare attempt at showing interaction rather than contiguity. Blackwood is right that her ex-husbands portrait style is not flattering nor was it intended to be. Even so, it comes as a shock, after a long looking at Freuds paintings, to turn to the photographs of many of Freuds sitters (and standers and liers) by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson in Freud at Work (2006). How sleek and erotic the human body really is, you think, and what a very nice colour too. Doesnt the benefits supervisor look good, and isnt our queen wonderful for her age? Its remarkable how few wrinkles shes got, considering. But then, photography has always been a flattering art just as portrait-painting used to be. In the old days (and in some quarters still) there was an unwritten contract between painter and sitter, because the sitter was the paymaster. Nowadays the sitter only pays if he or she buys the picture; and in any case, Freud would ignore any such unwritten contract, even if he believed it existed. Artists can be wrong about their own art: Gayford tells us that Freuds aim was to make his pictures as unalike as possible, as if they had been done by other artists. This must have been some kind of necessary delusion, perhaps designed to ensure that his attention and ambition did not flag. But mostly, artists know more of what they are up to than we do. Freuds aim was never to serve or copy nature, but to intensify it until it had such force that it replaced the original. So a good likeness is irrelevant to a good picture. His idea about portraiture, he once told Lawrence Gowing, came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person. He says to Gayford of his portrait: You are here to help it as if the sitter is a kind of useful idiot who helps the artist attain his larger aim. This can get precious, or unnecessarily complicated. Presumably, what the painter wants is for the viewer, when confronted with a portrait of a sitter familiar to him or her, to say, Yes, thats him/her, only more so. The intensification will then have been achieved. But likeness hasnt, and cant, be abandoned after all, what is Freuds intense scrutiny for, if not to see more clearly than others do? Would we ever react to a picture by saying: Oh, thats terrific it looks nothing like him/her, in fact it looks like someone else, but funnily enough its like an intenser version of them. I think not. The question also gets muddled up with another: how far the portrait displays the sitters character, how far it acts as a moral likeness. Gayford rightly points out that we respond to a Van Eyck or a Titian or an ancient Egyptian statue in ignorance of the sitters personality. (Also in ignorance of whether or not it is a good likeness.) But our reading of that Van Eyck or Titian will not be personality-free: we do not see it merely as an arrangement of paint. Part of the encounter will be about working out what this painted imitation or substitution tells us about the long-dead original. When we look at a very great portrait say, Ingress Portrait de Monsieur Bertin we take its likeness for granted and (leaving aside our purely aesthetic musings) respond as if Monsieur Bertin were alive and breathing in front of us. In that sense, the paint is the person. * Gayfords book is about an artist who also happened to be a man; Greigs book is about a man who also happened to be an artist. Greigs Wikipedia entry reminds us that members of his fathers family have been royal courtiers for three generations. Having edited Tatler and the Evening Standard, he is now, as editor of the Mail on Sunday, at the court of Rothermere. But more important to him, I would guess, were his years at the much more exclusive court of Freud. He spent many patient years applying for membership collecting the friendships of other artists on his way to the main prize before playing a cunning trick which gained him entry. He served at the court of Freud for the last ten years of the painters life, and, as he tells us, gained Freuds confidence and trust. He did so to the extent that the back-flap photo of Breakfast with Lucian shows the painter halfway towards smiling a rare achievement, since Freud had long perfected the granitic scowl he put on whenever a lens was raised in his direction. Greigs book is more substantial than it first appears not just breakfast, but coffee and a light lunch too. When dinner the full biography arrives, its author will have reason to be grateful to Greig, who gained access to Freuds early (and by now nonagenarian) girlfriends, to sitters, lovers, children and others who felt released into testimony by Freuds death. Whether Freud himself would have felt his confidence and trust had been misplaced is another matter. Greigs book will certainly do Freuds personal reputation harm. But it will also, I think, harm the way we look at some of his paintings, and perhaps harm the paintings themselves at least until a different generation of

viewers comes along. At one point, Greig suggests (quite plausibly, to my mind) that Freuds nudes might be related to those of Stanley Spencer; but Freud slaps him down, swatting at Spencers sentimentality and inability to observe. Had I been in Greigs position, I might have offered Egon Schiele as a Viennese ancestor, for the gynaecological poses, the loose brushwork and the colouring (see, for instance, Self-Portrait with Raised Bare Shoulder which advertises the current show at the National Gallery). But I would have been slapped down in my turn: Freud regarded Klimt and Schiele as shilling shockers who were full of false feeling. I doubt many would accuse Freud of false feeling, or question the sincerity of his constant reassertion of the artists role as truth-teller. But there is more to it than this. As Amis put it: Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart/Or squash it flat? Neither, one presumes, is the answer. The accusation against Freud would be that he is a heart-squasher, and nowhere more than in the female nudes which are the most contentious part of his output. They are proudly, truth-tellingly vulvic, literally in your face. His women lie splayed for inspection: Celia Paul, self-admittedly a very, very self-conscious young woman, found sitting for Freud felt quite clinical, almost as though I was on a surgical bed. Freuds men, on the whole, keep their clothes on, and lead with their faces; Freuds women, on the whole, (are made to) take their clothes off, and lead with their pudenda. His animals, which are allowed to keep their genitalia hidden, come out best of all but then Freud did say he had a connection to horses, all animals, almost beyond humans. There are two questions here. The first is technical, or physiological. There are many differences between peoples genitalia, but these differences are not expressive; they lead nowhere. That is why portraitists usually give more attention to the face, which is expressive, and does lead somewhere to a sense of the persons presence, and essence, even if it is a changeable essence. The second question is interpretative, and here autobiography, if it is not kept out, may percolate and stain. There is the male gaze in art; and then, beyond that, there is the Freudian gaze. His pictures of naked women are not in the least pornographic; nor are they even erotic. It would be a very disturbed schoolboy who successfully masturbated to a book of Freud nudes. They make Courbets The Origin of the World look suave. The question is the way in which they are autobiographical given that all Freuds work is and here biography comes in. We have known for many years, anecdotally, about Freud and women. That there were many of them; that he married twice; that his children were literally countless: he acknowledged 14, but may have had twice that number (he regarded any form of birth control as terribly squalid). On the whole, his women were posh; and, on the whole, teenagers when he met them. He was always a star compelling, mysterious, famous, intense, vital. One girlfriend told Greig: He was like life itself. Another said: When he was not there it was as if the light got dim. In the same way, he made everyone who was with him feel more illuminated and somehow more alive and interesting. So far, perhaps, so good: the dangerously magnetic artist, into whose forcefield women are drawn, is a centuries-old trope. And there are even moments when Freuds insistence on living life entirely on his own terms, with others fitting in accordingly, has its comic side. Here is a story which clearly means something to him, as he tells it to both Gayford and Greig with little variation: For example, I like spinach served without oil or butter. Even so, I can imagine that if a woman I was in love with cooked spinach with oil, I would like it like that. I would also enjoy the slight heroism of liking it although I didnt usually enjoy it served in that way. If this was Freuds idea of the heroic compromise a man makes when in love with a woman, its not surprising that Londons society hostesses did not consider him son-in-law material. But Freud, who never put any limit on things, was more than just a charming womaniser. He was priapic, no sooner acquiring a woman than he was after another, while expecting the first to remain available. Blackwood, his second wife, found him too dark, controlling and incorrigibly unfaithful not that he acknowledged fidelity as a concept in the first place. If this was hurtful, tough; the women could just get on with it. He was also sexually sadistic: two of his ex-girlfriends separately describe him twisting and hitting their breasts. But Greigs most destructive witness for the prosecution is Victor Chandler, a public-school-educated bookie, thereby folding into one person Freuds beloved

high-low divide. He adored Freud, but also tells the two worst stories about him. In the first, he and Freud who is already drunk went for dinner at the River Caf. In front of them as they arrived were two North London Jewish couples. Lucian could be terribly anti-Semitic, Chandler recalled, which in itself was strange. He took exception to the womens scent and shouted at them: I hate perfume. Women should smell of one thing: cunt. In fact, they should invent a perfume called cunt. On another occasion, Freud and Chandler talked about women: The conversation we had about that was that he needed sex to stay alive. It was his attitude to living, to need the release. I think he needed to dominate women in certain ways. He talked about everything. One night we had a long conversation about anal sex. He said unless youve had anal sex with a girl she hasnt really submitted to you. So whats this? Just a bit of tittle-tattle, as if from the pages of the Mail on Sunday, leaked by some Crawfie of the atelier, designed to damage the reputation of a great artist? More than that, I think. If you know these two stories, you cant unknow them, and they seem to change or, for some, confirm the way the female nudes are to be read. Some men, and many women, are, and always have been, made uneasy, indeed queasy, by them. They seem cold and ruthless, paintings more of flesh than of women. And when the eye moves from the splayed limbs to the face, what expressions do Freuds women have? Even in the early, pre-hoghair portraits, the women seem anxious; later, they seemed at best inert and passive, at worst fraught and panicked. It is hard not to ask oneself: is this the face and body of a woman who has first been buggered into submission and then painted into submission? Asked why he disliked Raphael so much, Freud said that while he had done some marvellous things, I think its his personality I hate. It is sometimes said of compulsive womanisers that they get off with women because they cant get on with them. (I first came across this crack in a biography of the womanising Ian Fleming, who knew and cordially loathed Freud who loathed him back.) Franois Mauriac, in his great novel of literary envy, Ce qui tait perdu, puts it more subtly and tellingly: The more women a man knows, the more rudimentary becomes the idea he forms of women in general. This was written in 1930, but is not irrelevant today. Though Freud painted very slowly, he painted all day and night, and ended up with a large corpus. Inevitably, he repeated himself, never more so than in the way he posed women. Though he usually paid no heed to his fan mail, he one day received a letter from a (black) woman solicitor asking why he had never painted any black people. And so he answered the letter, took up the challenge and painted her. No prizes for guessing the pose: naked, thighs open for our inspection, contorted head in the distance. It is a feeble picture. He called it Naked Solicitor. Biography infects other pictures as well, or rather, adjusts our previous reading of them. I had always imagined, for instance, that the paintings of Freuds aged mother in her paisley dress were gentle, tender works, similar in spirit to those Hockney painted of his aged parents. Biography corrects this interpretation. From an early age, Freud found his mothers interest in him repellent (she would do dreadful things like bring him food when he was poor), and throughout his life he kept her at a distance. When his father died, she took an overdose; she had her stomach pumped, but major damage had already been done, and she was reduced to a shell of herself. Only then when, as you might say, life had buggered her into submission did he begin to paint her. And as he put it, she had become a good model because she had stopped being interested in him. Freuds cousin Carola Zentner found it terribly morbid that he was painting somebody who is no longer the person they were because basically she was still alive physically but she wasnt really alive any longer mentally. Does this matter? Artists are ruthless, they take their subject matter where they find it, and so on. I think that in this context it does matter, because these pictures present themselves as loving portraits of dear old Mum and therefore exemplify what Freud abhorred: false feeling. Perhaps, in time, all this will cease to matter. Art tends, sooner or later, to float free of biography. What one generation finds harsh, squalid, unartistic, cold, the next finds a truthful, even beautiful, vision of life and the way it should be represented or rather, intensified. Two or three generations ago, Stanley Spencers nudes shocked many. This little man posing himself naked beside voluminous women indeed, wives whose breasts obeyed the law of gravity. Now such pictures seem, yes, gentle, tender works, and a true depiction of love and lusts playfulness. Will

gravity. Now such pictures seem, yes, gentle, tender works, and a true depiction of love and lusts playfulness. Will Freud come to seem the greatest portraitist of the 20th century? Will his nudes seem to future generations as Spencers do to us now? Or will Kenneth Clarks regret at Freuds early change of style appear vindicated? For myself, I think his tiny portrait of Francis Bacon greater than his monumental studies of Leigh Bowery. I also wish he had painted more sinks, and more pot plants, and more leaves, and more trees. More waste ground, more streets. Artists are what they are, what they can and must be. Even so, I wish hed got out a bit more. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Julian Barnes Heart-Squasher pages 3-8 | 5946 words

Diary
Peter Pomerantsev
There are any number of paths and initiations into sistema, the liquid mass of networks, corruptions and evasions elusive yet instantly recognisable to members which has ordered the politics and social psychology of Russian civilisation since tsarist times. When I arrived in Moscow to work as a TV producer my initiation took the form of a driving test. I would never pass, my instructor explained, if I didnt pay a bribe (500 dollars, but soon to double; I should get a move on). When I protested that I wanted to pass the test for real he said the traffic police would fail me until I paid up. He was a friend of a friend of my parents and I was told by everyone I knew that he was trustworthy. I gave him the money and he made the deal. I had assumed I would receive the licence in an envelope. To my surprise he told me to go to the traffic centre to take the test along with everyone else. The theory exam was held in a large, bright room with brand-new computers. There were around twenty of us working through on-screen simulations of various driving scenarios. I now decided, rather relieved, that my bribe had been lost in the works and set about using my common sense to get through the test. I got a handsome 18/20, enough to pass. Later I realised that every computer in the room had been rigged for an 18/20 result: everyone had paid. Then came the practical, which involved a sequence of manoeuvres round cones in a car park. I got into a car, an instructors model with two sets of pedals, next to a traffic cop in uniform. He told me to start the car. I was so nervous, and had completed so few lessons, that I couldnt master the pedals and kept stalling. The traffic cop smiled, glanced over his shoulder, and took control of the car. Put your hands on the wheel and pretend to drive, he told me. While he ran the vehicle from his set of pedals I cruised around with an inane grin. After a while I thought: this is almost like driving. It was the system in miniature the strange intermeshing of corruption and scrupulousness (you did have to go through the motions of the test), the role of officialdom as both obstructor and enabler, the co-option and the simulation. Everyone talks we all talk about sistema but the first person to pay it attention and try to define it academically is Alena Ledeneva in her book Can Russia Modernise? Towards the end , a sistema player recounts a formative experience:[*] I was about 12 and went to a sports camp. My friends were fishing near the camp and wanted to cook fish soup on the fire, so I went to the kitchen to ask for a saucepan and a couple of potatoes. I knew a girl in the kitchen and she gave me a saucepan and told me to pick up some potatoes from the cellar. As I was coming out of the cellar with four potatoes in the saucepan I bumped into the director of the camp. He decided I was a potato thief at once. Everyone was scared of him and I guess the kitchen girl denied her involvement. I was grounded to think about my behaviour but remained fairly confident that I had done nothing wrong. By the evening of that day a man passed by, flipped his ID and introduced himself as a security officer. He threatened to lock me away as a young offender if I didnt confess to the wrongdoing. I cried through the night and into the next day. Others were instructed not to talk to me, until one morning, an elderly trainer came over and spoke to me like a good cop. He said he understood I didnt mean it and I didnt do it, he said, the man who threatened me was only some friend of the director; and he said it would be easier for everyone if I simply apologised then everything

would be back to normal. He looked old, wise and trustworthy, and I couldnt bear my isolation any longer, so I gave in. My memory blocked how exactly the apology went, but I felt shame, fear and disgust when I saw the director in subsequent years. This was what sistema did to initiate people it made them lie: to accept responsibility for what one didnt do and vice versa; to compromise oneself by wrongdoing in order not to get others into trouble, to apologise for what one didnt do in order to be allowed to break free and enjoy life. Yet one never breaks free from sistema. For many young men initiation comes through the army, the subject of one of my documentary projects for Russian TV. A year of national service is in theory mandatory for males between 18 and 27 (with some exceptions), but anyone who can avoids it. The most common way out is a medical certificate. Some people play mad and spend a month at a psychiatric clinic. Their mothers bring them in. My son is psychologically disturbed, they say, even though they know the doctors know they are pretending. Several weeks in a loonie bin will set you back in the region of five to ten thousand dollars. You will never be called up again the mad are not trusted with guns but you will have a certificate of mental illness hanging over you for the rest of your career. Other medical solutions are more short-term: a week in hospital with an injured hand or back, but this will have to be repeated every year as April and October approach because this is when the drafts take place, leaving hospitals full of pimply youths simulating back trouble. The medical route takes months of preparation and research, finding the right doctor and settling on the appropriate ailment. The ailments that can exempt you change all the time. You turn up at the military centre with the little stamped registration that your mother has spent months organising and saving for, only to be told by the local recruitment commission that this year flat feet or short sight is no longer a legal excuse which may be the truth and may be an attempt to extract another bribe. If youre at university you can avoid military service (or take part in tame drills at the faculty instead): there is no greater incentive for young men to explore the world of higher education. And if youre not good enough to make it to college? Then you must bribe your way into an institution: there are dozens of new universities which have opened to service draft-avoiders. For poorer people, its a matter of hide and seek. During the spring and autumn drafts soldiers will grab anyone off the street who looks the right age, demand to see their documents and their letters of exemption, and if they dont have them, march them off to the local recruitment centre. So the young devote their energy to staying clear of metro stations, or hiding behind columns and darting past when they spot a cop flirting with girls or scrounging cigarettes off passers-by. You often see teenagers sprinting through the long, dark, marble corridors of the underground with figures in blue giving chase (they could of course be looking for drugs). When soldiers come by apartment blocks potential conscripts barricade themselves behind the door, holding their breath until the visitors go away. But by now they are in trouble: every time their documents are checked by the police, they tremble; every time they go into the underground, every time they cross a main road, or meet friends near a cinema, or even leave their little yard, they will be in a state of high anxiety. As a draft-dodger, you live semi-legally until you are 27. This is the genius of sistema: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother and your family have become part of the network of bribery, fear, simulation and dissimulation. You have learned to become an actor playing different roles in relation to the state, the great intruder you wish to avoid or outwit or simply buy off. You are already semi-legal, a transgressor, but thats fine for sistema: as long as you only simulate, you will never do anything real, you will always look for compromise and you will feel just the right amount of discomfort. You are now part of the system. If a year in the army is the overt process that binds young Russians to the nation, a far more powerful induction comes with the rituals of avoiding military service. Another film I was working on was about a successful young businesswoman called Yana Yakovleva, who had founded a pharmaceuticals company that imported and sold industrial cleaning agents to factories and military bases. One morning she woke up to find herself under arrest: the Federal Drugs Control Service had reclassified her cleaning agent, diethyl ether, as a narcotic. She was now a drug dealer behind bars, awaiting trial. She assumed it was a case of reiderstvo, the most common form of corporate takeover in Russia with hundreds of reported, and probably tens of thousands of unreported cases a year, earning an estimated four billion dollars in profit. Business rivals or bureaucrats long since interchangeable pay for the security services to have the head of a company

arrested; while they are in prison their documents and registrations are seized, the company is re-registered under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released the company has been bought, sold and split up by new owners. The usual way out is a bribe and there is a whole industry of pay-offs. Good lawyers are not the ones who can defend you in court the verdicts are pre-determined but those who have the right connections and know who to pay off in the judiciary and the relevant ministry. Its a complex game: pay off the wrong person and youve just wasted your money. Soon enough an array of middlemen appear, trying to persuade you that they, and only they, know how to pay the right person off. Yakovleva knew her parents were looking for that person on the outside. They had found a lawyer who said he could help: he suggested she admit to the charges and then he could get everything sorted. The bribe would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yakovleva smelled a rat. Her company had done nothing wrong, shouldnt she stick to her story? And what exactly was she meant to own up to? That shed traded what she traded? Face up to absurdity? If she started to negotiate, she told me, it would be like relinquishing a part of her sanity, letting the sistema dictate the terms at which point everything starts to slip. She decided to push back and go public, trying to get media and NGO attention. This was the anti-sistema approach: sistema is about deals done quietly in corners. At first her efforts had little effect. The head of the FDCS was Viktor Cherkesov, one of Putins older friends. During the 1970s and 1980s he had run the Fifth Directorate of the Leningrad KGB, in charge of arresting dissidents. In the new Russia its powers include breaking up trade unions as well as feminist and religious groups. Dissidents remember Cherkesovs young daughter calling during interrogations. He would pick up the phone, smile gently and change his tone: My pet, he would say, Im interrogating now. When Putin became president, Cherkesov was given the FDCS, considered the least prestigious of the security organs and less lucrative than the oil, arms, tax and customs portfolios. So what it did was launch a series of moves to capture the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Overnight a host of chemicals had their status changed from industrial or medical to narcotic. The plan, Yakovleva sensed, was to break these industries: force them to hand over their businesses to people with friends in the FDCS or share their profits. I was meant to swing by the side of the road on the proverbial gallows as a message to others, Yakovleva said to me. But Cherkesov had enemies. He was involved in a power battle with Nikolai Patrushev, another old Putin buddy and Leningrad KGB man, though from the far more glamorous counter-intelligence directorate. Patrushev was now head of the FSB, the KGBs successor. Cherkesov was trying to undermine him by investigating a customs scam run by the FSB on the Chinese-Russian border. In revenge Patrushev arrested FDCS generals at Moscow airport. So when the FSB saw that Yakovleva and other business people were being victimised by the FDCS they let their public campaigns to beat the Cherkesov clan go ahead they could have shut the protest down and didnt do anything to hold the media back. She was released; and around the time Patrushev won his tussle with Cherkesov, the charges were dropped and the ridiculous reclassification revoked. Though nothing would have been possible without her initial decision to fight publicly, even the bravest fighter against sistema has to dance with it to defeat it. The only reason I was being allowed to make films for Russian TV about subjects like Yakovleva was that the Kremlin was having one of its periodic anti-corruption drives and the media had been given a dispensation to investigate certain issues. I was working for a youth entertainment channel and during my time in Russia Id learned how to present these stories. I cut Yakovlevas tale together with the story of a woman whose child had cancer, so the show was about overcoming challenges rather than anything overtly political; I also cut out the part about the FSB, with Yakovlevas approval, so that it seemed to be the simple story of a brave woman fighting corruption, without any of the Kremlin intrigue. Around the same time I made a film about the army, which focused on hazing, but that story was interwoven with others about playground bullying and a reality show star victimised by her boyfriend. But then the Kremlins anti-corruption drive was adjourned these things are cyclical and I was gently told by my commissioning editors that they didnt want any more social films. I felt lucky to have got away with so much. I was learning to think like a sistemny. Soon afterwards I was offered larger productions by more important channels, and more overtly patriotic material about World War Two heroes. I agonised: on the one hand, there was nothing too crassly pro-Putin about the stories of great generals; on the other, the Kremlins overall ideological project was to praise Stalin and build Putins popularity around the defeat of the Nazis. In the end I decided not to

take up the war projects. Back in London I found myself covering the Berezovsky-Abramovich trial, one of the great illustrations of how sistema functions at the highest levels (and one of the key sources for Ledenevas book). As I sat at the back of the court I wondered what Mrs Justice Gloster could possibly be making of what Ledeneva describes as the unwritten rules, double standards, multiple moralities and forms of self-deception played out in the field of informal politics. Next door ran the humdrum affair of Plentyoffish Media Inc v. Plenty More LLP. But in Court 26 we were treated to a discussion on the meaning of the word krysha, which denotes political/mafia racketeering and racketeers. The case was ostensibly about Abramovichs oil company, Sibneft, and whether Berezovsky was a co-owner or an actual krysha. We agreed, that Roman will have 50 per cent of the shares and me 25 per cent, Berezovsky explained. So you agreed that you would actually become a registered shareholder? Gloster inquired. Not at all, Berezovsky answered. So you werent going to be a registered shareholder in any company? We concluded that we are shareholders and we didnt discuss how it will be registered. So you might have been a registered shareholder or you might not; either way? Exactly! As the trial went on it became clear that there are no Western-style property rights in sistema, only degrees of proximity to the Kremlin, rituals of bribery and toadying, and casual violence. As soon as Berezovsky lost his influence he lost his access to money. Putin and his network find it hard to leave the Kremlin now: the minute he retires they might lose everything. When it became time for the judge to give her verdict I had naively assumed she would dismiss both parties as dishonest. Instead she censured Berezovsky as unreliable and praised Abramovich as truthful and on the whole reliable. Berezovskys testimony was a mess, but Abramovichs gains are equally sistema-gotten and amid titters in the gallery, he had calmly stated that the presidential administration does not influence the justice system and that it was possible for Berezovsky to have a fair trial in Russia. There seemed to be an underlying significance in the verdict: by becoming the place where sistema players legalise their money and launder their reputations, London reinforces and spreads the model. Russians receive a quarter of the investor visas that the UK hands out to anyone who can pay a million pounds a clip. Its all part of the self-perpetuating circle in which most banks, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, are prepared to take on foreign clients if they have one of these visas: three quarters of the banks in our sample failed to take adequate measures to establish the legitimacy of the source of wealth and source of funds to be used in the business relationship. The London Stock Exchange is perceived as an easier place for companies from the former Soviet Union to be listed than the US, where regulations are tighter. Then there are the Lords on the Boards. Peter Mandelson, for example, was recently made an independent director of a Russian company called, with a truly Muscovite sense of irony, Sistema, whose owner, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, was part of the crowd around the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, when he was in his prime. Luzhkovs wife, Elena Baturina, is the richest woman in Russia. She made much of her money on construction contracts but denies that they had anything to do with the mayors office. Yevtushenkov began his career as a bureaucrat below Luzhkov running the science and technology department of the Moscow city administration, before going on to make his own money in telecommunications, electronics, tourism, trade, oil refining, construction and real estate. To his credit Sistema is generally considered a well-run company. Politicians shouldnt try to turn into businessmen, and businessmen shouldnt try to act like ministers and make their decisions for them. Thats the way it should be both in Britain and in Russia, in my opinion, Mandelson said when interviewed by the BBC the interview then appeared (did they get permission?) in

opinion, Mandelson said when interviewed by the BBC the interview then appeared (did they get permission?) in Russian Mind, a grand old magazine now based in London and owned by the son of one of the directors of Sistema. Here was a British public official criticising the intermeshing of business and politics while working for a company that has built up its power, at least in part, through relations with Russian politicians. Sistema has landed. [*] Tony Wood will review Can Russia Modernise? in a future issue of the LRB. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Peter Pomerantsev Diary pages 42-43 | 3362 words

Kill your own business

Deborah Friedell
BuyThe Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Bantam, 384 pp, 18.99, October, ISBN 978 0 593 07047 5 Jeff Bezos thinks of himself as a great man, and why shouldnt he? Our vision is to have every book ever printed, in any language, available in under 60 seconds. He wrote that ten years ago; now its almost true. When he graduated from high school, first in his class, he gave a speech to his classmates on how the fragility of the Earth required them to explore outer space and work towards rehousing humanity in orbiting space stations. He has used some of his fortune to turn 290,000 acres in West Texas into a giant laboratory for new spacecraft, which he claims will be so efficient and inexpensive to service that everyone will eventually be able to leave the planet. In his annual letter to the shareholders of Amazon, he acknowledges that some of his decisions may seem inexplicable, but its all about the long-term. To that end, he has donated $42 million to the construction of the Clock of the Long Now, which is supposed to tick for 10,000 years. His temporarily is not our temporarily. Bezos was born in 1964 in New Mexico. His mother was 16; his father, not much older, was a unicyclist in a circus. Bezos never knew him, and he was adopted by his mothers second husband, a Cuban petroleum engineer who fled Castro as a teenager and told Brad Stone that he takes credit for passing on a libertarian aversion to government intrusion into the private lives and enterprises of citizens. To taxes, for example. Jeff did well at school, particularly in maths and science; he went to Princeton; and by the age of 28 he was one of the vice presidents of a New York investment firm. In 1994, when the World Wide Web was a year old, he made a list of things that he might be able to sell in great quantities over the internet. In a supposed triumph for mail order and catalogue companies, the US Supreme Court had decided that businesses werent required to collect sales tax on behalf of any state in which they lacked a physical presence. Anything sold online was going to be cheaper than almost anything sold in a shop. Someone was going to make a fortune. Bezos created a regret minimisation framework: I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionising event. When I thought about it that way it was incredibly easy to make the decision. Bezoss list included clothes, computer software and office supplies. What he liked about books was that they were pure commodities: copies of the latest Stephen King sold online would be no better or worse than those sold in shops. But no actual shop was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled distribution for most American publishers: Bezos wouldnt have to make separate deals with each publishing house. Books also came assigned with International Standard Book Numbers and were catalogued on CD-ROM: that would save time, and Bezos was in a hurry. The companys motto was Get Big Fast. The Amazon isnt just the largest river in the world: its larger than the

next seven largest rivers combined. Bezos preferred the name Relentless.com, but friends persuaded him that it sounded sinister. (Type Relentless into an address bar and you still get directed to Amazon.) He also considered Bookmall.com (but he knew that soon enough he wouldnt only be selling books) and Cadabra.com (sounded too much like cadaver). Naturally he couldnt set up the business in New York too many potential customers lived there, and he didnt want to charge them all sales tax but somewhere isolated would make it difficult to hire engineers. The compromise was Seattle: at least Microsoft was nearby. Washington is also one of the few American states that doesnt charge any personal income tax. (In 2010, Bezos donated $100,000 to a campaign that successfully defeated Initiative 1098, supported by Bill Gates, which would have started taxing those who earn more than $200,000 a year.) Bezos took a four-day bookselling course through the American Booksellers Association. He used his savings and took out loans to hire a small staff, and his parents put up money from their retirement fund. They didnt know anything about the internet, but they trusted him. At first only web geeks shopped from Amazon, and for a year its bestselling book was How to Set Up and Maintain a World Wide Web Site: The Guide for Information Providers . To make the site livelier Bezos hired an editorial team to review books, but sacked them when he realised that customers preferred doing it themselves. (My first book review was a freebie for Amazon: five stars for Jane Eyre.) Distributors made Amazon order ten books at a time, but Bezos got round the system: You didnt have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said: Sorry, but were out of the lichen book. Amazon advertised itself as the worlds largest bookstore, but didnt actually hold any stock: a customer would order a book from Amazon, Amazon would order it from a distributor and pass it on. It was the kind of transaction that ordinary bookshops do all the time: the difference was that Amazon run from Bezoss garage, later from crummy offices in the cheapest part of town could afford to take 30 or 40 per cent off bestsellers, 10 per cent off everything else. Any business meetings were held in a caf inside a branch of Barnes and Noble. According to Stones The Everything Store, which charts Amazons growth from bookseller to all-around mercantile hegemon, one of Bezoss favourite books is Sam Waltons autobiography, Made in America, about the creation of Wal-Mart. Bezos made his top employees read it, then realised that it was simplest just to replace or augment them with executives from Wal-Mart so many of them that Wal-Mart sued, alleging that Amazon was stealing trade secrets. Waltons creed, as Bezos understood it, was to have lower prices than your competitors, even if doing so cut into your profits or meant you had to treat your employees like garbage. With lower prices youll get more customers; with more customers you can push suppliers to lower their prices, which will let you lower your prices even further, thereby attracting more customers; repeat until your competitors are dust. Mega-bookstores Borders and Barnes and Noble were slow to take to the web, but Bezos prepared for them by patenting 1-Click checkout, which just meant that customers shipping and billing details were saved and stored: no need to type them out next time. The patent was written so broadly that when Barnes and Noble did start selling books online, Amazon was able to prevent their Express Lane checkout, even though it required two clicks. Every American webstore was forced to be clunkier than Amazon unless, like Apple, it paid Amazon huge licensing fees. This lasted until 2006, when a New Zealand actor with a side interest in intellectual property law finally produced evidence that another e-commerce company had actually patented one-click shopping first, under a different name. But by then most of Amazons would-be competitors were defunct. In 1995, the pioneer web-browser Netscape went public at $28 a share and tripled in a day, even though it had never made money. Raising capital would no longer present Bezos with any difficulties. Amazon started making its own deals with publishers, cutting out distributors and building warehouses: as at Wal-Mart, they were first called distribution centres and were miserable. Few of them had air-conditioning: on hot days it was cheaper just to station private ambulances outside to cope with the employees who inevitably collapsed. Workers carried little devices that kept track of their speed on the floor, and Amazon regularly got rid of the slowest. (The best article about what its like to work in one of these places is Mac McClellands I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: My Brief, Backbreaking,

like to work in one of these places is Mac McClellands I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave: My Brief, Backbreaking, Rage-Inducing, Low-Paying, Dildo-Packing Time Inside the Online-Shipping Machine, which was published in Mother Jones last year.) No other company was as good at sending things out, fast and cheaply. Stone explains: A customer might place an order for a half dozen products, and the companys software would quickly examine factors like the address of the customer, the location of the merchandise in the Fulfilment Centres, and the cutoff times for shipping at the various facilities around the country. Then it would take all those variables and calculate both the fastest and the least expensive way to ship the items. The company still didnt make a profit after it went public in 1997. One business writer, Matthew Yglesias, likes to say that Amazon is practically a charity run by investors for the benefit of the worlds consumers. Bezos assured his shareholders that Amazon was betting big on the future: any idiot could make Amazon profitable overnight just by not investing in infrastructure. Cheap books had coaxed people to try shopping online; now Amazon would begin to sell them everything else. It added a music store, then movies, bought companies in China and offices in Luxembourg to shelter its taxes. In a failed attempt to create a rival to eBay, Amazon Auctions, it spent $175 million to acquire the company Accept.com. According to Stone, its most avid user may have been Bezos himself, who spent $40,000 on an Ice Age cave bear, complete with an accompanying penis bone. A price comparison site, Junglee.com, cost Amazon $187 million, and was then abandoned; PlanetAll, an early social media site, cost $93 million; a premature entrance into the toy market cost $39 million in unsellable merchandise. For several years the company bought or invested in almost every major site that was trying to sell things over the internet and lost money on all of them. But with each failed acquisition, the company was acquiring scores of programmers at a time when there werent enough good ones in the US for all the tech companies that needed them. (Amazon has since joined Apple and Microsoft to lobby for immigration reform. Top priority: more work visas for Indian engineers.) It learned how to reshape the site for each user, constantly, instantly. Programmes to recommend products to customers based on their previous purchases were so effective that Amazon could leverage them. If a small publisher wouldnt give Amazon deeper discounts than it offered other booksellers, Amazon would promote a competitors titles instead. It was all part of the Gazelle Project, after Bezos said Amazon should go after publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle. Publishers would sometimes hold out against lowering prices for a few weeks, but Amazon stocked books that no one else would; and they paid their bills, when suddenly there werent very many other booksellers around to pay them. Bezos told the Washington Post (before he bought it) that to be nine times bigger than your nearest competitor, you actually only have to be 10 per cent better. And his site was better, though by how much who could say? In 1999, when Toys R Us launched its website in time for Christmas, Amazon bought out its entire stock of the most popular toys (taking advantage of a free shipping promotion), and resold them on its own site. Toys R Us was fined by the Federal Trade Commission for over-promising. A department within Amazon called Competitive Intelligence noticed that a New Jersey company called Quidsi was having success with a site called Diapers.com: it sold nappies at a loss to entice customers to buy its other baby products. Amazon tried to acquire the company, but Quidsi wasnt interested. So Amazon started selling its nappies for even less than Quidsi, though it meant losing $1 million a day. When Quidsi still wouldnt sell, Amazon threatened to start giving away nappies. Quidsi sold to Amazon; nappy prices went back up. To make Amazons catalogue deeper than barnesandnoble.com, it bought up stock from used book dealers, then started letting the dealers sell their stock on Amazons site for a fee. Publishers didnt like their new books competing with cheaper versions of the same titles, but Amazon made money either way. In addition to selling products from their own warehouses, they would become the biggest middleman of the internet: more than two million registered marketplace sellers pay Amazon fees and commissions to have their products listed on the site, or pay Amazon to warehouse and ship their products for them. There are blogs that keep track of the more unlikely items: tanks, wolf urine, simulation models for infant circumcision, uranium ore, live ladybirds, Zimbabwean trillion dollar banknotes. Type in dog Halloween costume, and youll see thousands. The more different things the site sold, the more people used the site, the more businesses would pay to have their products listed on the site. Customers were a commodity like anything else. But it was losing out on music. Apple had taken control of the digital music market while Amazon kept pushing CDs. They wouldnt allow the same thing to happen to books. Hence: the Kindle. Your job is to kill your own

CDs. They wouldnt allow the same thing to happen to books. Hence: the Kindle. Your job is to kill your own business, Bezos told the engineer in charge. I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job. He was convinced that Apple had made the iPhone too profitable: the smartphone market became glutted with cheaper competitors. Instead Amazon would lose money when people bought the Kindle, but make money when they used it by buying e-books from Amazon. Publishers that didnt digitise enough of their catalogues, or didnt do it fast enough, were told they faced losing prominence in Amazons search results or in its recommendations to customers. Amazons plan to charge only $9.99 for e-books frightened publishers, who knew it would cut into their hardback sales. When five major US publishers attempted to create an electronic bookstore with Apple, Amazon complained to the US Department of Justice, arguing that the publishers were conspiring to raise prices for electronic books in violation of antitrust law. The publishers paid at least $164 million to make the charges go away; they also gave up their bookstore. Stone has covered Amazon almost since its creation, first for Newsweek, now for Bloomberg Businessweek. He admires it because its good at giving us what we want, which is why he thinks we should fear it; and he thinks it will expand until either Jeff Bezos exits the scene or no one is left to stand in his way. In the few months since Stones book went to press, Amazon has bought eight million square feet of warehouse space and taken on 70,000 temporary American workers for the Christmas rush; launched Amazon India and a Kindle store in Mexico; unveiled a new tablet; started the largest website for the sale of fine art; begun selling groceries throughout Los Angeles (other markets to be announced); and made an unprecedented deal with the US Postal Service to have customer deliveries on Sundays. London is to get Sunday deliveries too, via Amazons own trucks. The company is also preparing to launch its own smartphone (possibly with eye-tracking software: no clicks necessary, just blink) and is manufacturing a box that will let users access Amazon content through their televisions. All this in addition to building up its own publishing house, television and film studio, and continuing its dominance over the sale of server space for tech companies. The Everything Store is listed for sale on Amazon. MacKenzie Bezos, Jeff Bezoss wife, has reviewed it on the site: one star out of five because she doesnt think its accurate. Shel Kaphan, Amazons first employee, also reviewed it four stars and says that it is, by and large. You can buy it new in hardback at 46 per cent off list price; or cheaper used; or even cheaper on Kindle. You can also listen to it through Amazons company Audible.com for free if youve never tried Audible.com before. Shipping is free if youre willing to buy something else too, and theyre betting you will. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Deborah Friedell Kill your own business pages 17-19 | 2863 words

Some Damn Foolish Thing

Thomas Laqueur
BuyThe Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark Allen Lane, 697 pp, 30.00, September, ISBN 978 0 7139 9942 6 Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchmans bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote, was unnecessary, meaningless and stupid, begun by overwhelmed, misguided and occasionally mendacious statesmen and diplomats who stumbled into a catastrophe whose horrors they couldnt begin to imagine home before the leaves fall, they thought. It was in many ways a book for its time. Tuchmans story begins with Edward VIIs funeral on 20 May 1910. The kings sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edwards least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany.

the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edwards least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany. Wilhelm loved and admired the British and they loved the kaiser: to him, the Times said, belongs the first place among all the foreign mourners; even when relations were strained, he never lost his popularity amongst us. Four years before Armageddon the German emperor was decidedly not the antichrist he would become. The book ends with the Battle of the Marne one of the decisive battles of the war which ended the German hope for a quick victory and set the stage for four years of deadlock and misery. Tuchman says nothing about Austria-Hungary and Serbia on the eve of the war, and nothing about the RussoAustrian and Serbo-Austrian fronts once it began. The inexhaustible problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war, she thinks, and in any case nothing much happened there in the period she covers. More surprising is that in the first third of the book there isnt a word about Serbia. The assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 goes by in two sentences, one of which, a quotation from the oracular Bismarck, may be all she needs: some damn foolish thing in the Balkans would ignite the next war. Why was this story so compelling in the 1960s? I think because at the height of the Cold War the world needed and embraced a morality tale of the sort Tuchman offered. It goes like this. In 1914, two opposing power blocs, each in the process of a massive and historically unprecedented military build-up, came to feel that it was more dangerous not to respond militarily to a relatively minor incident at the periphery of Europe than it was to do so. The precise nature of each stage of the July Crisis, or of earlier crises, is less important to Tuchmans cautionary tale than the dnouement: the failure of the great power blocs to negotiate their differences and the catastrophe that this failure unleashed. For the generation immediately following the Second World War, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the hydrogen bomb that the Russians exploded in 1961, little was left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] The Missiles of October, his brother Robert quotes him as saying. If anyone is around after this they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace. Following Tuchman, he believed that European statesmen somehow seemed to tumble into war, because of their stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur. He would not follow suit. (Appeasement, about which Kennedy had written his undergraduate thesis, might have come more immediately to mind and had less happy consequences.) Judging from his hawkish counsel during the 13 days of the crisis, Lyndon Johnson was less impressed by Tuchman. But when Kennedy was assassinated he too had the First World War in mind, arguing that what happened in Dallas could plausibly be as badly misconstrued as the murder in Sarajevo had been fifty years earlier. A comparable mistake today, Johnson believed, could leave twenty million dead instantly. Christopher Clarks breathtakingly good book is, much more self-consciously than Tuchmans, also a history for its that is, our times. An act of terrorism in Sarajevo the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife led the Austrian government to make demands on Serbia. If not quite a terror state, Serbia had close links to terrorism and made no effort to hide its view that Austria had it coming. The boundaries between official state policy, the army and clandestine terrorist cells were blurred at best. The Serbian prime minister, Nikola Pa"i#, may not have planned the assassination but he clearly knew about it in some detail and failed to pass on any but the most vague in todays terms not actionable warnings to Austria. Serbia had something to answer for. Clark, however, begins with an earlier terrorist act, the grotesque murder in 1903 of the Serbian King Alexander and his wife, Draga, by a small group of officers acting as part of a larger conspiracy. They found the royal couple cowering in a closet, tricked them into coming out, and riddled their bodies with bullets; they then bayonetted the corpses, hacked them to pieces and partially disembowelled what was left. The queens near naked and almost unrecognisable body was tossed over the balcony into a garden. One of the plotters Dragutin Dimitrijevi#, Apis (the Serbian word for bull) as he was known would in 1911 become a founding member of the secret, ultra-nationalist organisation Union or Death, a.k.a. the Black Hand. In

1913, he became head of the intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, a job that put him in a position to arrange to smuggle the weapons and the boys, as Clark calls them (Gavrilo Princip who fired the fatal shots, was a month shy of his 20th birthday), over the border into Bosnia. That same year, one of the officers who had participated in the coup of 1903, and was notorious for carrying with him a dried bit of flesh cut from Queen Dragas breast, was pardoned at the armys insistence for the murder of a less than enthusiastic recruit. Pa"i#, who had become prime minister in 1903 as a consequence of the murder and had close ties with the plotters, was still prime minister in 1914. The governing classes of Serbia and the shadowy Black Hand were bound together by the policy of irredentism: a poisonous mixture of self-serving history and mushy metaphysics that seeks national redemption by regaining lost land and lost glory. The Serbian version is that losses to the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo fought in 1389, ten kilometres from todays Pristina had left the south Slavs and the Serbs in particular stranded in strange lands under Muslim rulers. It was this defeat that had to be redeemed: where there was a Serb or someone who could be construed as a Serb there was or ought to be Serbia. This view motivated two deadly and brutal wars in 1912-13, in which first Greece, Montenegro, Serbia and Bulgaria clawed land away from the Turks and then Bulgaria lost much of what it had gained to its former allies. Serbia was the biggest territorial winner. It was the history of the 16th and 17th centuries that brought the Habsburgs into this 20th-century story. Fast forward to 1908: the Austrian annexation of Bosnia that year infuriated Serbian nationalists, who felt betrayed by the European powers and in particular by Russia, which allowed it to happen. In 1912-13, Serbia invaded Albania, to whose independence Austria was committed. Its soldiers murdered three hundred Gostivar Muslims and threw them into mass graves; hundreds more were killed in small incidents before the Serbs, at Austrias insistence and again with the backing of the other European powers, were forced to leave by the treaties that ended the Balkan Wars. On the 525th anniversary of the Serbian defeat at Kosovo the archduke and his wife paid a state visit to Bosnia. It didnt occur to anyone that this might have been an inauspicious date. But then, why should it have? Sarajevos civic architecture, its university, its hospital, its city plan were Habsburg; economic development had proceeded apace. The royal pair expected and got a warm reception. They were happy to be away from Vienna, where court protocol made their lives difficult. Moreover, 1913 and early 1914 seemed to contemporaries to be a golden time of peace and promise; few saw the darkness to come. Delusion, Clark suggests, contributed to the risky behaviour of key actors as they tried to sort through the fallout from that day. But neither a history of terrorism in Serbia, nor irredentism and nationalism more generally, made a Serbo-Austrian, still less a Europe-wide war inevitable. An Austrian peace party, led by the soon-to-be murdered Ferdinand, had envisaged a sort of United States of Europe as the way forward; Ferdinand had prevailed over more bellicose colleagues at various tricky moments in the course of the preceding decades. And in Serbia too there were men of peace. Even in the negotiations over the Austrian ultimatum of 23 July 1914 there were many in Belgrade who were ready to compromise. The Sleepwalkers is also a book for our time in its emphasis on contingency and the role of what Clark calls the multiple mental maps in the decisions that were taken. The war in his account was not the consequence of two great alliances yielding to specific provocations. If anything, it was the opposite; it was the weakness and unreliability of the alliances, and the lack of certainty about who would be on whose side, that exacerbated the crisis of summer 1914 in the capitals of Europe. (Political scientists who have studied the question used to think that in only 25 per cent of cases did allies act as their treaty partners expected, which makes you wonder why statesmen make treaties in the first place. A more statistically sophisticated analysis of wars between 1816 and 1965 gets the proportion up to 75 per cent, but that still leaves plenty of room for chance. Those who took Europe to war in 1914 had every reason to be uncertain.) Statesmen at various levels and in at least five countries were testing a system whose workings were beyond their comprehension. No single logic, no master narrative led to a determinable end. There were structural limits to policymaking. The dynamics of great power politics had been shifting for decades before 1914, as the rise of Germany and

the rapid economic and military growth of Russia unsettled the system. Austria slowly shifted from being among the guarantors of peace in the Balkans to being seen as a threat. Clark tells this well-known story efficiently and with an important new twist that I will come to in a moment. But it does not drive his narrative. The Sleepwalkers sticks resolutely to how and not why the war happened. Or rather, it responds to the question why? with many answers to how? as the years, weeks and then days pass during which various paths to peace were not taken until none was left. Clarks story is saturated with agency. Many actors (the crowned heads of Europe, military men, diplomats, politicians and others), each with their own objectives, acting as rationally and irrationally as humans are wont to act, made decisions that foreclosed on others and collectively led the world into an unimaginable and un-imaged war. Collectively, they produced the greatest black swan event in world history. In the absence of the Homeric gods or the providential wisdom of a monotheistic God to account for what seems so random, Clarks narrative sophistication, his philosophical awareness and his almost preternatural command of his sources makes The Sleepwalkers an exemplary instance of how to navigate this tricky terrain. It is not only the best book on the origins of the First World War that I know but a brilliant and intellectually bracing model for the writing of history more generally. * Work on the origins of the war tends to fall to one side or the other of the necessity-contingency divide. There are the tragico-ironic stories that echo Tocquevilles observation about the French Revolution: Never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable and yet so completely unforeseen. By virtue of its magnitude and consequences, the Great War must have great causes: the crisis of imperialism (that was Lenins view); nationalism and its conservative turn in the late 19th century; the forty-year arms race; the system of alliances; the domestic politics of left and right; or, as Arno Mayer, one of my own teachers, argued, great architectonic pressures, which began to sweep away the old regimes of Europe in 1789 and finally succeeded by 1918. (Two empires and one kingdom that had been party to the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 were swept away.) These sorts of explanation offer analytic clarity but, Clark argues, at the expense of distorting the story: they create the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure, with factors piling on one another, each pushing down on events. Political actors become the puppets of outside forces: Causes trawled from the length and breadth of Europes prewar decades are piled like weights on the scale until it tilts from probability to inevitability. This doesnt, I think, preclude the view offered fifty years ago by Paul Schroeder, a leading American diplomatic historian, that the statesmen and politicians involved felt themselves to be in the grip of forces beyond their control and that this perception influenced their actions. Nor does it mean that some indeed most of the actors were not wrong about which ways these forces were moving. (We are within measurable or imaginable distance of real Armageddon, Asquith said on 24 July 1914. Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators.) Human agency, however benighted, is everywhere in this book. But that doesnt mean it is written to indict any one agent or the servants of any one nation or to make the case for inadvertency or pure contingency. Those who emphasise contingency as the way to address the why question tend to be interested either in counterfactuals or in laying blame or, more usually, in both. The case for the prosecution has to show that, but for the wilfully criminal behaviour or near criminal stupidity of the leaders of one country or another, the war would not have happened. Clark does not go down this route. Some historians would accuse him of being a wimp, but there is good reason for his rejection of the forensic turn. The actors themselves, as he points out, started the blame game before the war even began and thus distorted the historical record by virtue of what they published or lost, remembered or misremembered. Tens of thousands of books and articles have already been written to support almost every conceivable case for guilt based on self-serving evidence. Passing judgment may sometimes be the task of the historian; but doing so is tricky. Probably no historical judgment in world history has been more dangerous and protean than the infamous article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, which blamed the war on German militarism and on civilian leaders who did what was necessary to make Germany a world power. Field Marshal, now President Paul von Hindenburg, dressed as colonel in chief of a Prussian regiment, told a great crowd in 1926 at the dedication of a war memorial at Tannenberg (where in 1914 Germany had destroyed the

great crowd in 1926 at the dedication of a war memorial at Tannenberg (where in 1914 Germany had destroyed the Russian Second Army) that German soldiers had marched to war in 1914 with clean hearts and that Germany was ready at any moment to prove this fact before an impartial tribunal. Jews and socialist parliamentarians had been excluded from the ceremony. Soon after coming to power Hitler spoke at Tannenberg about Germanys shame in losing a war it had never wanted. Clark says it isnt up to him to determine whether some of Serbias complaints against Austria were justified or whether France had anything to fear from Germany. A prosecutorial narrative has a built-in telos: the guilt of the accused. Historians gather and interpret evidence to prove a case which, in turn, may be motivated by a great variety of political and more broadly cultural interests. In the 1960s the German guilt hypothesis, for example, got a big boost from the research of Fritz Fischer and his school, who used a well-documented but slanted indictment of German militarism on the eve of the First World War as a way of expiating the sins of the Third Reich in the Second World War. Again, Niall Fergusons provocative and brilliantly argued The Pity of War blames the British foreign secretary, Edward Grey, for dragging his mostly reluctant cabinet colleagues and thus his country into a war that spelled the beginning of the end of the British Empire and the decline of Britain as the dominant world power. Nothing, Ferguson argues, forced Britain to go to war over Belgium. But for Grey, no Great War. Clark would not claim to be the first person to argue against historical scholarship as a brief for the prosecution. In his classic 1928 study, the American historian Sidney Fay wrote that a European and ultimately world war broke out in late July and early August 1914 because in each country political and military leaders did certain things which led to mobilisations and declarations of war, or failed to do certain things which might have prevented them and that responsibility is thus to a greater or lesser degree widely distributed. This, in one sentence, is also Clarks view. But he would not want to downplay the sort of political contingencies that lend themselves to counterfactual history and to making the case for war guilt. He allows himself to wonder what would have happened had Grey, with his long-held belief that British foreign policy should focus on the German threat, not been foreign secretary and not managed to persuade his colleagues by 4 August that not meeting the German threat in Belgium would be more dangerous for Britain than meeting it. And what if Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, the doveish and conservative finance minister and chairman of the tsars ministerial counsel, had not been dismissed before the crises of 28 June and he, rather than the Germanophobe and wildly pro-Serbian foreign minster, Sergei Sazonov, had been the dominant figure in Russian debates about what was to be done? And what if the Austrians had attacked Serbia soon after the assassination, when they had the sympathy of much of the world but had not yet gone through all the negotiations that brought the world to war? The Sleepwalkers resists both the big structural theories and causal explanations based on contingency alone. Like a chess analyst, Clark shows how each move and countermove by many different players led to a colossal checkmate. The first part of the book outlines the contours of the international system which in 1913 seemed to be entering an era of dtente. Parts of the story are familiar: the German-Austrian Treaty (the dual alliance of 1879); the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894; the entente cordiale between France and Britain signed in 1904; and most dramatic of all, the convention of 1907 between the old adversaries, Britain and Russia. But, Clark argues, to see in these configurations the so-called alliance system that went to war in the summer of 1914 is a mistake: only in retrospect are the two sides visible. There was lots of treaty-crossing in the years before August 1914: Russia and Germany met in 1910 to settle questions about their interests in Turkey and Persia; France came to an agreement with Germany over their differences in Morocco in 1909. And while it is true that in Britain Germany had come to replace Russia which in turn had replaced France as the imagined great enemy, this was by no means a fixed view. Important voices still argued that the Russian threat to India and British interests in Central Asia were far greater than the German threat at sea or on the Continent. A major policy review was planned for 1915. More generally, Clark makes it clear that the commitments that emerged to produce the great catastrophe were not long-term features of the European system, but the consequences of numerous short-term adjustments. The loss to the Japanese in the war of 1904-5, for example, ended any serious Russian foreign policy aspirations in Asia and made European interests, i.e. the Balkans, the sole focus of its attention. Germany would not have become so prominent in British policy thinking if Grey and his supporters had not gradually tightened their grip on British

policy. But even to speak in this way is to assume that particular politicians or rulers spoke for their nations, that there were such entities as France or Germany or Russia that made decisions about matters of life and death. This misses the terrifying truth that it was an illusion that those who made or executed foreign policy spoke for the nation or even for the governing classes. The executive power in Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary was an emperor who, in the imagination of many, spoke for his subjects as well as for the state, but in fact spoke for god knows whom, and not even consistently for himself the kaiser for one was notoriously mercurial and unconstrained. Information flowed or failed to flow without oversight or order between ambassadors, staff and ministers; it was unclear, organisationally and constitutionally, who had decision rights. No one knew for whom the press in each country spoke or how susceptible individual policy-makers were to its pressures. Some of these difficulties obtain in high-level decisionmaking today, but Clark shows that matters were far worse in 1914 and that the uncertainty engendered by this cacophony of voices had a great deal to do with the way people responded to 28 June. The Balkans had become a locus of instability on the periphery of Europe and a focus of Russian foreign policy. Insofar as war was expected this is where it would happen. (Serbia endured the heaviest casualties of all the combatants, losing almost a quarter of its male population aged between 15 and 49, almost twice as many as France and Turkey lost.) A second new factor was that France came to view the very real problems that Austria had with its near terrorist neighbour as little more than an opportunity for German gain. It is clear that neither the Russians nor the French, or the Serbian government for that matter, had the slightest interest in seeing Austrias evidence for Serbian complicity in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. The Serbian press made clear that it rejoiced in the death of the archduke; from the French perspective the Balkans had become a place to stop Germany. The only part of Clarks analysis of the force fields of European political culture on the eve of the final crisis I find unconvincing is his discussion of what he calls a crisis of masculinity: a preference for unyielding forcefulness over the suppleness, tactical flexibility and wiliness exemplified by an earlier generation of statesmen was likely to accentuate the potential for conflict. Its hard to say whether Bismarck was more secure in his masculinity than von Moltke but problems with masculinity have been at the heart of war since Troy. I doubt they were any more critical in July 1914 than at any other time. * Murder in Sarajevo: this moment in the story is well known but Clark tells it grippingly. Franz Ferdinand, a leader of the faction of the Austrian government that had for a decade been seeking a peaceful resolution to the Balkan problems, a happily married man, was enjoying his ride in an open car through the streets of Sarajevo with his wife, Sophia, by his side. Part of a six-car motorcade, he was not afraid, despite the fact that the Bosnian Croat leader had told him that, because 28 June was the anniversary of Kosovo, there was a sense of heightened nationalism among local Serbs. If we could marry Monty Python to Greek tragedy we would get what happened next. Seven young men were waiting to kill the archduke; none of them today would make it in al-Qaida. The first was paralysed with fear. The second managed to throw his bomb but it missed its main target; the driver of the archdukes car heard the percussion cap go off and accelerated. Sophia got a scratch and the passengers in the car behind were wounded. The would-be assassin botched his suicide and was quickly caught. One might have thought that the archduke would now call it quits, but he insisted on taking care of the wounded and after that on heading to the town hall, where he made a speech. Three more assassins all froze, undone by fear, as he passed by; one reported that when he saw Sophia he felt sorry for her. After the public ceremony Franz Ferdinand decided that it might, after all, be best to cancel the rest of his programme but before he left town he wanted first to visit the wounded in hospital. His hosts had the good sense to change the planned route, fearing that yet another assassin might be waiting. The motorcade would go straight down the Appel Quay rather than make a right turn on Franz Joseph Street. But no one told the driver about the change of plan. This is the wrong way, the Austrian in charge shouted as it became clear the car was pursuing the original route. The car had no reverse gear and had to be

charge shouted as it became clear the car was pursuing the original route. The car had no reverse gear and had to be pushed to get onto its new route. This was Gavrilo Princips moment. He rushed up Franz Joseph Street to the stranded car and, after some hesitation, shot the royal pair at point blank range. Given what we now know, Clarks story is like a horror movie. Cant they hear the music? Dont they know not to walk down a long back-lit hall? Franz Ferdinand and Sophia died almost instantly. The fate of the adolescent assassin is not within the chronological scope of this book but it speaks to the world-historical import of what he did. Princip was instantly captured, but wasnt executed because he was too young. Instead, he was sent to the Austrian fortress at Terezin, where he died miserably in April 1918. His prison is better known today as the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where visitors can see his cell and his manacles amid the detritus of the Holocaust that he did a great deal to make possible. The rest of The Sleepwalkers gives a week by week and then day by day account of the way the many possibilities for peace, or at least for a limited war, had been reduced to none by 4 August. Contingency became necessity. Perhaps because I write this in the weeks after Yom Kippur, I think of the phrase the gates are closing: the general European war that no one imagined came to be written in the Book of History. Or to put it in more secular terms, history became literature. The difference between a fictional narrative and one purportedly disciplined by the real world is that the characters in the fictional world cannot do other than what they do. But the world of human action, and especially of national and international politics, is far larger than even the most peopled novel or tragic play and those who act on its stage make choices that arent predetermined. The beauty of Clarks final two hundred pages is in the care, intelligence and authority with which he explains how disaster happened; how the crisis in its many forms developed and options for action became ever more limited. The filigreed elegance of his narrative is lost in summary but I will give two examples. On 6 July it seemed that the German state was speaking with a single voice; in response to Austrian entreaties, the kaiser and his chancellor promised to support Austria, assuring it that the German army was ready for whatever happened: this is the famous blank cheque that is said to have hastened the coming of the war and revealed how eager Germany was for it. But there is strong evidence to suggest that Germany intended nothing of the sort. Or, to put it differently, that few believed the German cheque would be cashed, seeing it as an effort to limit to a local war any conflict that might follow from Austrias quarrel with Serbia. The army made no plans for a general war; the kaiser believed the war would be localised. And in any case, no one believed that Russia would actually go to war over Serbia. It had capitulated to Austria in 1913 and it was assumed that the tsar wouldnt appreciate the antimonarchical inclinations of the Serbian terrorists any more than the kaiser did. The Germans had also failed to grasp the significance of the pro-peace Kokovtsovs removal from the chairmanship of the council of ministers; like the British, they believed the pro-German party was in the ascendant. Nor had anyone fully understood how much a quarrel over Serbian independence was, as the deconstructionists say, always already a part of the thinking of the French-Russian alliance. And finally, if the Russians really wanted to use this occasion to go to war, better now than later. Germany had recently co-operated with Britain over the Balkans so there was little reason to believe that it would become involved. Under the constraints of a deep opacity risk came to seem safer than caution. The second example is the Austrian ultimatum that was finally delivered to Serbia on 25 July after a great deal of diplomatic dithering and a long drafting process that might have ended in a very different document. The supposed outrageousness of points 5 and 6 is often said to have made compromise impossible and to have assured a wider Balkan, if not a world war. The first of these demanded that Serbia agree to allow organs of the imperial government to play a part in the suppression of anti-Austrian subversion within its boundaries; the second demanded that Austria have a direct role in investigating the criminal network behind the assassination. France, Russia and of course Belgrade took this as an outrageous attack on Serbias inviolable sovereignty and to be tantamount to a declaration of war. The Austrian demand was, as Clark points out, a whole lot less of an infringement of Serbian sovereignty than the

1999 Rambouillet Agreement, which Henry Kissinger described as a provocation, an excuse to start bombing. It was less of a provocation, to say nothing of a direct assault on Serbian sovereignty, because the core problem irredentism didnt respect national boundaries and it was unclear what direct role Serbia had in the 28 June plan, even if it was committed to the ideology that motivated it. Furthermore, once Pa"i# and his colleagues focused on the ultimatum they were inclined to avoid a war by acquiescing. It was Russia that urged resistance; it was only on receipt of a telegram revealing that Russia had ordered mobilisation that the tone changed, and even then the response was evasive rather than dismissive. Meanwhile, Poincar, the French president, had been in St Petersburg, making sure that his allies there kept the German danger clearly in mind. And even after all this, there were further moments of indecision before the gates really closed. On 29 July in response to the famous Dear Nicky telegram from the kaiser, the tsar could not bring himself to sign the general mobilisation order. Finally, on 30 July, he did. A last small chance at least to contain a war came with Germanys decision to force an ultimatum on Belgium to allow it passage through its territory instead of just marching in; and with the British debate over whether to get into a war over Belgium whose result was by no means predetermined. But, finally, on 4 August, all of the how pieces of the puzzle came collectively into place. Only on the very last page does Clark offer a general explanation for the big story and this is the one place where I think he is wrong on a question that matters. The protagonists of 1914, he concludes, were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world. There are three things wrong with this. First, the watchful calculated steps that he has been chronicling dont constitute sleepwalking. On the contrary, as he has shown on page after page. Second, the evidence that he offers for the general blindness of the time is nothing more than a gesture based on a self-congratulatory leading article in the Figaro on 5 March 1913, extolling the horrific force of French arms and the nations medical organisation, that we may confidently describe as marvellous. I agree that it was easier to imagine away the horrors of what was to be a conventional war than it would be in our nuclear age, and this may be the reason the arms build-up of the Cold War the biggest war in world history has had no climactic dnouement; it is a story of the dog that didnt bark. But to see the Figaro article as an instance of sleepwalking is to miss the important question of exactly why perfectly alert contemporaries imagined the course of the war as confidently as they did, and why they couldnt see the evidence before their eyes that modern warfare would be horrendous. One can only make guesses. Perhaps the memory of how destructive the new technology had been in the Franco-Prussian War was lost in the repression that followed the Commune, while the Russo-Japanese War had shown that a defensive strategy could gain a big advantage over an offensive one and the big story of that war was about navies, not foot soldiers. Why Europeans should have remained unaware that in the American Civil War hundreds of thousands of men had been mowed down as they crossed open fields against the fire of new and more accurate rifles is puzzling. But the history of the imagination is not a history of sleepwalking, whatever else it is. Finally, the metaphor of sleepwalking elides a horrible truth about history that Clarks book makes so poignantly. The 19th-century way of putting it was to say that the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Walter Benjamin puts it in a more 20th-century sort of way: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Thomas Laqueur Some Damn Foolish Thing pages 11-16 | 6112 words

Short Cuts
Joanna Biggs
In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was supply-led or demand-led. Two years ago, 70,000 people used food banks and now 347,000 do. What is a supply-led food bank? another peer wanted to know. Freud wrote the Lex column in the FT before Tony Blair asked him to lead an independent review of the benefits system (he completed a draft in three weeks, despite admitting he didnt know anything about welfare at all), so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. If that sounded like jargon, I apologise, Freud replied. I meant that food from a food bank the supply is a free good, and by definition there is an almost infinite demand for a free good. I wouldnt call the demand at Kensington and Chelsea Food Bank the Friday I visited infinite. On the day it opened at the back of St Lukes Church, Redcliffe Gardens in November 2012, the vicar, Adrian Beavis, wondered if anyone would show up. The congregation at St Lukes had been collecting tins for the food bank nearest them, in the neighbouring borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, for about six months when they heard that a number of people from their own borough of Kensington and Chelsea were using it. A broom cupboard was cleared, more donations solicited (along with the tins of tomatoes and packs of nappies came caviar, loose-leaf Orange Pekoe tea in a suede pouch with tassels and handbag-sized bars of Green and Blacks chocolate) and the food bank opened. The first user was down to his last 3 and debating whether to spend it on himself or his cat when he heard he could get a voucher from his GP for the food bank. He wasnt to know that the eccentric donors to the Kensington and Chelsea Food Bank had also given Whiskas. Ten minutes before the food bank opened on the afternoon I was there, a woman in a dark coat with an orange Sainsburys bag appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Ive come to collect something, she said. People turn up at the food bank with an A5 form on bright red paper that has been filled in by someone in authority who knows their situation doctor, social worker, Citizens Advice Bureau adviser, Job Centre adviser and entitles them to an emergency food ration intended to feed them and their family for three days. Its not designed to be an infinite good: only three vouchers can be issued per calendar year. Its unclear what the clients are supposed to do if the government spends more than nine days deciding their case. If someone turns up without a voucher, they can have a cup of tea and a rummage in the free items box (gourmet foods, exotic foods, dented tins, the sign says) but they cant be given a food parcel. The lady with the Sainsburys bag sat down in a low armchair and was given tea and cakes donated by a local caf while her parcel was prepared: Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, two tins of Heinz soup, black-eyed beans, Del Monte canned peaches, tinned fish, rice, juice, UHT milk, a silver tin of Nescaf Azera and a packet of biscuits. Three American study-abroad students fetched and carried and packed everything in new Waitrose carrier bags, one bag inside another in case one split on the way home. They brought them over and put them on the floor alongside her Sainsburys bag. I wasnt allowed to speak to her, but I sneaked a look at her voucher, and in the section headed nature of crisis, benefit delays had been ticked. I could see she hadnt taken off her coat. The students said shed seemed happy; theyd volunteered in soup kitchens in New York and New Jersey, and were bemused by the food cupboard: So many baked beans. Before leaving, the woman was offered a prayer. Something light and brief, thanking God, asking him to open doors that she might know his love and protection, Charlotte, the vicars wife, told me. Not many refuse, though some ask for their prayer to be dedicated to someone they knew needed it. Over the past year, the Kensington and Chelsea Food Bank has served 489 people. The most common reason for using it is delays to benefits, followed by changes to benefits. Nationally, the Trussell Trust the Christian charity behind 350 food banks across the UK, including this one has found the same thing: 30 per cent come because the state has stopped its support. Charlotte told me that people describe a bureaucratic nightmare: doctors forms are sent but never received; a wife becomes self-employed and benefits are stopped for the duration of the investigation into her earnings; a patient is discharged from hospital, and because his benefits were stopped while he was ill, he

into her earnings; a patient is discharged from hospital, and because his benefits were stopped while he was ill, he now has nothing. Some people have to be coaxed in; they tell the volunteers theyve worked at a food bank themselves in the past. Lots say theyll donate to the bank once theyre back on their feet, and some (cat food man, for instance) do. If they had it their own way, theyd go shopping for themselves, Tania Stanley, a 21-year-old volunteer on Jobseekers Allowance, said. I thought of the Waitrose bags being carried home all over Kensington and Chelsea; no one could tell who had done their shopping at the food bank. The food store itself was cool and dark. Before it was a broom cupboard, it was a side entrance to the church, and above the white plaster walls, there was a border of black and red bricks in a pattern. The church was designed by the Godwin brothers in 1872-74, when the Gunter family, whod made their money in confectionery, built houses for architects, doctors, jewellers, widows and spinsters on what had been fields of walnut, mulberry and apple trees. Now the greatest proportion of Kensington and Chelseas residents work in finance and insurance. Child poverty, nevertheless, is at 19 per cent. Cawston Press Cloudy Apple Juice, Pampers nappies, Nutella, a great deal of Green Giant tinned sweetcorn, Spam, loo paper and Jaffa Cakes: Kimberley, the food bank co-ordinator, told me that people tend not to donate sweet things and meat. I find a tin of Le Pt Hnaff mmm sur les toasts lapro and wonder if it was donated by the French under-vicar who had just invited me to his wine-tasting here next week. But perhaps the donors know what theyre doing. One 65-year-old man told the volunteers he hadnt been able to afford the loose-leaf tea he adores for 12 years. He was thrilled when Charlotte, who overheard him, snuck to the cupboard and presented him with the tasselled suede pouch. Orange Pekoe! His favourite! Just a shame it wasnt single estate. The first Trussell Trust food bank was in a shed in Salisbury a fancy shed, with a pitched roof and a veranda. Paddy Henderson, the charitys cofounder, had been fundraising for Bulgarian orphans in 2000 when he received a call from someone in his own town who couldnt afford to eat. Food banks are extraordinarily new. In Elizabeth Gaskells novel of the Hungry Forties, Mary Barton, those who are clemming, or starving, just get used to it. And those who are not can barely imagine it. George Wilson in that novel goes to ask the mill-owners help for a friend whos dying, and waits for his audience in the kitchen as the servants are making breakfast. Wilson hasnt eaten: If the servants had known this, they would have willingly given him meat and bread in abundance; but they were like the rest of us, and not feeling hunger themselves, forgot it was possible another might. Lord Freud ought to read Mary Barton. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Joanna Biggs Short Cuts page 29 | 1351 words

At the Movies
Michael Wood
My Nazis are different, Ernst Lubitsch said in reply to critics who hadnt liked his film To Be or Not to Be. The critics thought he was failing to be funny about what shouldnt be laughed at anyway, the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Lubitsch we can read his response in the material accompanying the recently issued Criterion DVD version of the film thought the critics had failed to see how even Nazism could become a routine, a home for stock figures and therefore mechanical, ridiculous. The invasion is not trivialised in such a view, but it is held up to an austere comic light where everything is a simulation or fraud of some kind. It is true that the film isnt all that funny in any immediate sense. Mel Brookss 1983 remake of the film is very funny, and plunges with gusto into every aspect of the bad taste Lubitsch was wrongly accused of. There are musical numbers, including Sweet Georgia Brown in Polish, a comic Hitler sequence borrowed from The Great Dictator, and great performances from Brooks himself, Anne Bancroft and Jos Ferrer. But the jokes are not about Nazis or about history. They are about the piety and melodrama we have wrapped them in for our protection. Things are different with Lubitsch. Here, even a famous line, literally repeated (and amplified) by Brooks, has an

Things are different with Lubitsch. Here, even a famous line, literally repeated (and amplified) by Brooks, has an eerie air about it, as if its topic were at the same time invisible and too obvious. When Jack Benny, playing a Polish actor impersonating a German colonel, is told that his repressive exploits are admired all over Europe and that he is known as Concentration Camp Ehrhardt, he chuckles like a man deeply flattered, as if he were being told that his performances of Falstaff would always be remembered or more to the movies point, that he was as famous as he wished he was. His battered vanity is a recurring theme. People repeatedly fail to recognise him as the great, great actor he keeps calling himself, and when a visitor does remember a particular show it is because he thinks, in another of the films well-known epigrams, that the Jack Benny character did to Shakespeare what Hitler did to Poland. Then when Benny returns to the Concentration Camp nickname, still chuckling, and invokes it several times in a row, it is because he is playing for time and cant think of anything else to say. And there is the final intricate gag structure that emerges when Benny, now in another disguise, tells the actual Ehrhardt about his honorary title. The man says, in exactly the flattered, amused tone Benny had invented as a fiction, So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt? A claim to fame, a piece of flattery, grounds for self-congratulation, a temporising tactic, and an instance of absurd life imitating absurd art: this is a lot of work for a single phrase to do, yet none of it encompasses or even looks at the meaning of the phrase. The camps just flicker there in the dialogue, an offstage horror; but perhaps, Lubitsch would say, all the more of a horror for being (just) offstage, so frivolously not part of the main play. The film opened in 1942, just two years after The Great Dictator, but it feels as if it belongs in mood to a time when everybody knew who had won the war. Not quite 1983, certainly. Say, 1956. Its not that these Nazis couldnt win: theyre not that different. But even if they won they would still be trapped in their caricature of themselves, and the double take that opens the film dominates almost every moment of it. We are in Poland in 1938, no invasion has taken place, yet people in the street are staring in horror at a small strutting, uniformed figure: Adolf Hitler. The man turns out to be an actor from Jack Bennys troupe, he has the role of the Fhrer in a play theyre doing called Gestapo, which seems, in rehearsal at least, to consist mainly of people saying Heil Hitler all the time and making one feeble salute after another. Then the actor wants to prove he really can be taken for Hitler, and goes out onto the Warsaw streets again. A child asks him for his autograph as an actor. Take one: to seem to be is to be. Take two: to seem is only to seem. The plot of the movie, which involves a German spy, Polish members of the RAF, and the need to rescue fake Nazis from real Nazis, rests on this double possibility. If seeming is being, all kinds of things can happen. The risk of real-life acting is that seeming could always be uncovered as seeming. The title phrase itself has an even more complex role in the movie. Carole Lombard, as Jack Bennys wife, tells an admirer to come and see her in her dressing room as soon as Benny, playing Hamlet, starts his celebrated soliloquy. Therell be plenty of time. The admirer gets up and makes his way along a row of theatre seats. Benny thinks this is a critical comment on his performance and gets upset. More so when it happens again, and again. Is he more upset or less when he learns that the man is not reacting to the stage performance but going backstage to see Lombard? Hard to tell. Its all vanity either way. As is her willingness to see her admirer. Shes not really interested in him, only in being admired. Theatre people. So far the Poles are nicer than the Nazis but no less caught up in their own self-image, still just caricatures of what an actor or an actress or a suitor are. The point is about the universality of theatre and posture. Its a good point, and part of what Lubitsch means when he says his Nazis talk about torture with the same ease as a salesman referring to the sale of a handbag. Wrapped in old routines, all of them. What gets the film out of these routines is not its storyline or argument or a twist on the grand theatrical metaphor but Lubitschs trust in his stars, and his sense of what a movie star is. Benny and Lombard say their lines and wear their make-up well enough for the story to move along. They are, as the credits say, Joseph Tura and Maria Tura. But they carry these roles as forms of half-donned costume, and we keep seeing in them not the tale of Polish actors playing parts but the literal reality of American actors playing themselves. In this way Lubitsch designs their escape from simulation, and his strongest answer to the Nazis is not to suggest that there are better historical actors than they are, but to create figures who can appear not to be acting. Of course to play oneself is still to play a part, but it is also to assert a form of freedom. Behind or inside Benny the terrible classical actor is Benny the impeccable comedian, and if many of his lines are too dark or bitter to be funny, his timing and his sense of himself create a whole new dimension for the film. The implication is not just that the Nazis and the story he

sense of himself create a whole new dimension for the film. The implication is not just that the Nazis and the story he is in are ridiculous but that he is not really there. He is not even trying to believe what isnt or shouldnt be believable. Lombards dissenting effect is different but just as strong stronger, perhaps. She is elegant, a little languid, plays down the affectations the script gives her, has an air of calm sincerity when she pretends to like the sinister spy who is trying to get her to say Heil Hitler. We dont feel shes not there, in the plot, in Poland. But there is something so luminous, so unruffled and alive about her face and her gestures that the plot shrinks around her, and Poland becomes, as anywhere would, her real native country: the movies. Lombard died in a plane crash before the film opened, and if we know this fact its hard to keep it out of our minds as we watch her. The film literally says what Roland Barthes says all still photographs say: this person is going to die. But even without this fact, as Lubitsch must have known, Lombard refutes his Nazi world whereas Benny only suspends it. Benny knows how to be ridiculous with style, but no one could make Lombard look ridiculous at all. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Michael Wood At the Movies page 36 | 1455 words

At Camden Arts Centre

Marina Warner
Silhouettes are polite, a parlour art, practised in gemtlich Vienna and Berlin among families who also formed quartets and played the piano; they were often made by the same accomplished daughter who would perform at home for a soire. The arts antecedents are Asian: an Egyptian shadow puppet, dating back millennia, featured recently in the British Museum exhibition about the Arabian horse, and in Indonesia and India puppeteers, working with perforated figures on sticks against candle flames, still recite sacred epics. But as time passed in the West, clever scissorwork became a young womans skill, and dropped below stairs; the bastard progeny of the paper cut are the doily and the cutlet frill. Yet Lotte Reiniger, a Berliner who died in London in 1981, adapted the craft to make experimental shadow films, as she called them, turning the pastime into an art form with her ambitious full-length animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and her later, whimsical childrens shorts for pantomime and TV. Kara Walker talks about her own art as a way of playing, and comments on the uncanny intimacy of the medium as she manipulates her figures, but rather oddly, avoids mentioning Reiniger (as far as I can see). Yet Reinigers articulated shadow puppets, with their crooked, expressive fingers, rolling eyes and tufts of unruly hair springing from the silhouette outlines, inform Walkers energetic caricatures, while other techniques for example, the use of superimposed lengths of coloured tissue paper identify her as one of Reinigers daughters, especially in the powerful film Fall frum Grace: Miss Pipis Blue Tale , one of the most compelling exhibits in this solo show at the Camden Arts Centre (until 5 January). Since her incendiary success more than twenty years ago, Walker has vitiated the decorum of paper cuts with a vengeful, cold relish. From a distance her friezes of silhouette figures look innocuous a paper chain of dolls or an ornament by Arthur Rackham in a fairy story. Come a little closer and they start to distort and twist like faces in a fairground mirror. A portly, elderly gent is doing something unspeakable with a charming little girl, as the bows bounce on her plaits; a gracious chtelaine with a young black boy and a darling little capering dog are engaged in something so outlandish that you look on shaken at the filth materialising under your eyes. Auntie Walkers Samplers, the new works on the walls in Camden Arts Centre, made in situ for one of the rooms, depict acts of genital cruelty and class tyranny remembered by witnesses to the abuse of slaves and told to abolitionists. The results are as disturbing as anything in Goyas Disasters of War or the Chapman Brothers defacings of Goya.

Since her earliest works, such as The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995), Walker has shown astonishing fluidity in the domestic skill of silhouette portraiture, in order to revisit the history of slavery. She still draws on slaves own stories, and the winsome title of this exhibition parodies their style, landing firmly at the close on an N-word: We at Camden Arts Centre Are Exceedingly Proud to Present an Exhibition of Capable Artworks by the Notable Hand of the Celebrated American, Kara Elizabeth Walker, Negress . This is very much the artists trademark, flouting the pieties which in her view conceal modern-day realities. The work of more recent historians of the Civil War and the plantations also inspires her later polemical fictions on the screen as well as the page: her art has a deep rapport with Toni Morrisons Beloved. She stirs up ghosts and has no hand in laying them to rest. The centre wall of samplers deploys white figures cut from black paper: the subjects are all absences. This frieze, The Sovereign Citizens Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration , brings the story from the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly antebellum. (William Kentridge, the South African artist and filmmaker who also alludes to magic-lantern shows, has staged similarly ironic festivities and pageants though with a more raucous sense of drama as he too explores the changing tensions around race in contemporary America and Africa.) Like her central procession of cut-outs, Walkers large charcoal drawings from a series called Dust Jackets for the Niggerati bring her inquiry closer to the present day, as she imagines works that could or should be written now (African Africouldve Africould form a sequence she has written). In the interview screened in the show, she says she has been immersed in white supremacist writing, driving herself giddy and mad: her images return obsessively to stock fantasies of rape and abjection, rage and docility, hatred and nurture, Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima. None of the horrors of slavery, she seems to say, has been set aside or overcome. But beyond the hoods of the Klan, or the obsession with cockmanship, its difficult to understand what the drawings are about if you arent immersed in the materials Walker has explored with such relentlessness. A long, hard struggle with racial defamation is still going on, but should older nightmares be revived in the process? This is the question Tony Judt asks at the end of Postwar, in relation to the Holocaust. Can letting go offer a kind of renewal, or is it merely a convenience for oppressors and bystanders? In the mid-1990s black artists were angered by Walkers insistence on raising these ghosts. When she was given a MacArthur genius award in 1997, the American assemblage artist Betye Saar organised a letter-writing campaign questioning the validity of a black persons attempt to reclaim and reverse racist imagery through irony. Thom Shaw, another artist who prefers to be called African-American, commented: Were still looked at as Sambos. Walker admits to drawing on minstrel imagery; Uncle Tom and Aunt Jemima and the Tar Baby reappear in her cast of characters, along with golliwogs and other stereotypes, but she argues that she is voiding them of their power: My work attempts to take those pickaninny images and put them up there and eradicate them. Yet there has been continued bitterness about her approach among strategic anti-racists favouring black role models, heroes and heroines of emancipation, Sojourner Truths and Mary Seacoles. Walkers invocation of abject and comic or terrorising and savage ancestral ghosts has made her work an object of desire for collectors, connoisseurs and bankers. I once went to an opening in New York, followed by a smart party in a collectors apartment. One room was lined with Kara Walkers, and its hard to convey how it felt to be wining and dining surrounded by pictures of race porn, floggings, burnings and lynchings, all done in that imperturbable maidenly form of the paper cut. A contemporary artist who

succeeds in the art world can fall under a different regime of possession: branding. The term has a horrible reverberation in the context of Walkers work. After the Deluge, her response to Hurricane Katrina originally an installation, now a book (Rizzoli, 16.95) gives prominence to a quotation from Fanon: I am not the prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. Walkers subjects are given black masks, projected from the fantasy of whites, male and female, in a sustained act of counter-mimicry: they co-opt the enemys fearsome labelling, to deflect the terror back onto its source. Its a fundamental manoeuvre in the natural world including among humans designed to neutralise adversaries. In rituals, the terms dont need to evolve; indeed continuity counts and images stay the same: St George has spiny armour like a dragons in order to face the beast, St Michael ditto in his victory over Satan. But art is ceremony only up to a point. Artists can be imprisoned by the art worlds expectations, condemned to repeat the story that brought them to its attention. Their work may have the comforting assurance of repeated ritual, but it loses energy, and though its not the transgressors fault when their line in outrageous blasphemy becomes all the rage, it defangs their bite. The friezes of silhouettes in this show are Walkers stock in trade, her equity, her brand. Their shock tactics feel well rehearsed rather than explosive. Other works experiment with less ironical forms of resistance and survival. In one of her expansive, convulsed drawings, she seems to be depicting adult baptism a foray into the pervasive role of religion in the history of black emancipation. Sketch for an American Comic Opera with 20th-Century Race Riot is a turbulent, scrawly triptych drawn last year. In both the results are ambiguous, lacking the pure blowtorch virulence of her Southern moralities. The characterisation still alludes to the cartoon figures in her cut-outs, but at least she is engaging with tensions and choices that are recognisable to us now. In her writings, Walker drops her masks; her voice is immediate, at once self-lacerating and self-protective as she confronts her critics. No doilies, no frills; art as armour for mind and body: I make art for white boys to feel up their sisters at no. no shame. I make art for white girls to finger thier prissies no. no shame in that I make art for artists to fire thier furnace I make art for Kara, so that she wont burn us. Vol. 35 No. 23 ! 5 December 2013 Marina Warner At Camden Arts Centre page 41 | 1637 words

The Logic of Nuremberg

The distinction Mahmood Mamdani draws between the Nazi war crimes trials and the Codesa agreement in South Africa may not be quite as clear-cut as he thinks (LRB, 7 November). As in South Africa after apartheid some laws which were an offence to human rights remained in force and were acted on long after the defeat of the Nazi regime. A case in point is the treatment of homosexuals following their liberation from the camps. The Nazis had purposefully re-enacted paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which the Weimar government had repealed, thereby recriminalising homosexuality between consenting adults. Records indicate that some ten thousand gay men were sent to the camps under this law. Very few survived. But unlike the other liberated inmates, gay men were sent on to civilian prisons to complete their sentences. Whats more, the time they spent in the camps was not counted against their sentences, since the camps were designated labour camps, not prisons. The Nazi law remained in force in the GDR until repealed again in 1967; in the Federal Republic there was only a partial repeal in 1969 and full repeal in 1973. For them, unlike Jewish, political and other categories of inmate, there was no restitution or

compensation even after the repeal. Tony Simpson Wellington, New Zealand

The Reviewers Song

William MacFarlane suggests that Jeannie Campbell inherited her style of speech from her father, the Duke of Argyll, who spoke with all the haughty affectation of his class (Letters, 21 November). I knew Jeannie Campbell well for many years on the Cycladic island of Sifnos. She certainly had an upper-class English accent, but even I, reared in a working-class family in the suburb of Balmain, Sydney, found no sign of haughty affectation in her speech or behaviour. MacFarlane noticed a comparatively minor mis-statement by Andrew OHagan (or Norman Mailer?) of Campbells relationship to Beaverbrook (she was his granddaughter, not his daughter). But in 1996, in a confused review in one of his former newspapers of a television programme about his secret life, she was referred to as one of Lord Beaverbrooks many mistresses. An out-of-court settlement funded restoration of a near-ruin she had bought in Sifnos with a publishers advance on her memoirs, which she never wrote. Kevin Anderson Lucerne, Switzerland

Winning, or rather losing

Its not a sport in America, Benjamin Markovits writes, if everybody doesnt have a real chance at winning ( LRB, 7 November). For as long as Ive been conscious, I have been a fan of the Chicago Cubs, a baseball club that hasnt made it to the World Series since 1945 and hasnt won it since 1908. At this point, we have gone beyond the hundred-year rebuilding plan. I have had to endure countless taunts and comments; once, a New York Mets fan asked me if the Cubs lack of success was down to their playing day games after which the players would drink themselves into oblivion. My answer: no, it was based solely on a lack of talent. My son also a fan and I have had serious discussions about his four-year-old son and whether or not we want to impose on him a lifetime of misery and frustration by encouraging him to follow the Cubs. But what choice do we have? We cant risk his becoming a fan of, say, the Boston Red Sox or, worse, the Chicago White Sox. Despite the socialism in American sports which extends to publicly financed stadiums certain teams, it seems, still dont have a real chance of winning. Losing has become so much a part of their identity that its inconceivable they could have even a chance of success. Its no longer just a lack of talent: it is something larger and now inexorable. And I have gone through the five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Im over it. Roger Berger Everett Washington DC Benjamin Markovits assures us that Britain has always had great golfers. Not if we define greatness in that field as winning a major championship, since no British golfer won a major between Max Faulkner in 1951 and Tony Jacklin in 1969. Those titles were both won in Britain: no British golfer won a major outside the UK between 1930 (Tommy Armour, the PGA Championship) and 1988 (Sandy Lyle, the Masters) with the exception of Jacklins 1970 US Open. Justin Horton Huesca, Spain Benjamin Markovits says that the England cricket team choked when playing India in a World Cup final. For this word to apply a team must first find themselves in a dominant position, something England have failed to achieve in the knockout stages of the World Cup in over twenty years.

Samuel Kirwan Bristol

Statuemania
In his discussion of Daumiers lithograph Salon of 1857, captioned sad countenance of sculpture placed in the midst of painting, Julian Bell mentions Why Sculpture Is Boring in Baudelaires Salon of 1846 (LRB, 21 November). This has rather unfortunately become the most frequently cited essay on sculpture. What few seem to realise or to want to realise is that Baudelaire revised his wholly negative opinion about sculpture. He devoted a long section of his Salon of 1859 to sculpture, and although he repeats some of his earlier criticisms, he modulates them, and is clearly enthralled by chance encounters in variable light with the products of 19th-century statuemania. By now he was increasingly giving primacy to the imagination, and the essence of the imagination was mystery. So sculptures stumbled on in churches, libraries, parks, streets and squares are magnificent and prodigious phantoms: Your eyes are drawn upwards the stone phantom takes possession of you for a few minutes and commands you, in the name of the past, to think of things which are not of the earth. Of Daumiers airborne Man on a Rope, painted at just this moment, Bell says that Baudelaires argument [of 1846] is inverted: the brute, unruly paint is coming between Daumier and the clean sculptural concept of his imagination. I dont think Daumier ever had clean sculptural concepts thats neoclassicism. But his mysteriously elevated man, drawing our eyes upwards with its eroded spectral presence, uncannily echoes Baudelaires argument of 1859. James Hall Winchester

In Jenin
Adam Shatz states that in the Jenin camp in the early 1950s, more than ten thousand people were squeezed into a space not much bigger than five hundred square metres ( LRB, 21 November). That is the area of a rectangle 25 metres by 20 metres, or 82 feet by 66 feet, giving ground space per refugee of about 10 inches by 8 inches. I expect he meant an area five hundred metres square i.e. 500 metres by 500 metres. This is 250,000 square metres and amounts to 25 square metres (5 metres by 5 metres) per refugee, which is still overcrowded but at least physically possible. David Howell Ilkley, West Yorkshire

The Clinton Connection

Pankaj Mishra describes Mochtar Riadys travels and investments in China, but makes no mention of the importance of Bill Clinton and the State of Arkansas to the fortunes of the Riady family ( LRB, 10 October). When he was governor, Clinton allowed the Riadys to obtain banking licences in Arkansas, which in turn made it possible for them to purchase a controlling interest in a Californian bank. The Clinton connection introduced Riady to US retail giants Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney, who consequently became tenants in Lippo Village, which was ransacked in the 1998 riots. James Riady made a substantial contribution to Clintons presidential re-election fund, which was later declared illegal (Riady is a foreign national); in consequence, he was fined $8.6 million, the largest fine ever levied for such an offence. However, he compensated the Clintons during the fall-out from the Whitewater saga by providing a bolthole in Jakarta for the disgraced former Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker in a Riady-controlled cable TV company. Mishra says that when he visited Jakarta he didnt find any Dutch self-aggrandising monuments: that was because they were all dismantled and destroyed by the Japanese occupation forces in the Second World War.

Glenn Bruce Jakarta

Sold Out
Anne Summers complains that, in discussing Everything for Sale?, I gave details of the career of Roger Brown but not of Helen Carasso, with whom he wrote the book (Letters, 21 November). Her reproach is misplaced. I was merely following the indications in the book itself, where the acknowledgments, signed by Roger Brown alone, state that as author I take full and final responsibility for Everything for Sale? He there gives warm acknowledgment to the role of my researcher, Helen Carasso. Stefan Collini Cambridge

The, Of, And

Brian Rotmans review of Benoit Mandelbrots The Fractalist models what the Zipf-Mandelbrot law predicts (LRB, 7 November). In his review, roughly a 3000-word sample of written English, the (ranked number one in frequency in written English) appears very close to twice as often as of (number two) and nearly three times as often as and (number three). All looks good. Historically, however, of has not always been number two in frequency. In early Old English, occurrences of of were quite rare inflectional endings did much of the grammatical work now handled by of. Then, from the eighth through to the 15th century, of steadily began to signal more and newer concrete and abstract relationships, to the extent that the entry for of in the Oxford English Dictionary now takes up six pages (triple columns, fine print). As of worked its way up to number two in frequency, it caught up with and eventually passed and, a word that had been very common even in Old English. So, as of passed and, there would have been a period of perhaps fifty or a hundred years, when of and and were essentially tied for second place. Does the ZipfMandelbrot law allow for such linguistic change? More important, lets suppose that of continues to increase in frequency and eventually overtakes the to become the new number one. Would of suddenly appear twice as often as the, as the law predicts? It seems unlikely. Why is it, though, that the law seems to be valid? Dave Rankin Wichita Falls, Texas

UN Nightmare
I was reading Lynn Vissons tale of interpreting at the UN when I came across a report of what she terms the real nightmare: an interpreter whos failed to turn off the mic before offering an opinion on a speech just interpreted (LRB, 7 November). On 14 November the UN passed nine resolutions condemning Israel. The interpreter thought that was unfair: I mean, she said, I think when you have five statements, not five, but like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, theres gotta be something, cest un peu trop, non? I mean, I know, yes, yes, but theres other really bad shit happening, but no one says anything about the other stuff. Benjamin Netanyahu played the clip to his cabinet, and said: I hope nothing bad happens to the interpreter, but in order to remove all doubt I can say that a place of employment is assured her if things go in that direction. The clip quickly made it onto YouTube. Naomi Sobol Framingham, Massachusetts

Julian Barnes

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist by Geordie Greig

Letters Tony Simpson, Kevin Anderson, Roger Berger Everett, Justin Horton, Samuel Kirwan, James Hall, David Howell, Glenn Bruce, Stefan Collini, Dave Rankin, Naomi Sobol Thomas Laqueur
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark

Gillian Darley My Fathers War Deborah Friedell

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

John Burnside Poem: Erosion Ian Sansom

The Quarry by Iain Banks

Glen Newey
The Harm in Hate Speech by Jeremy Waldron

Michael Dobson
Thirty Great Myths about Shakespeare by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith

Richard J. Evans
A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe, 1940-45 edited by Jrn Dwel and Niels Gutschow

Joanna Biggs Short Cuts Colin Kidd

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden

John Pemble

Disraeli: or, The Two Lives by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young The Great Rivalry: Gladstone and Disraeli by Dick Leonard Disraeli: The Romance of Politics by Robert OKell

Michael Wood At the Movies Michael Grayshott

Animal Trials by Edward Payson Evans

Mark Ford Poem: Show Time Terry Eagleton

Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait by Denys Turner

Marina Warner At Camden Arts Centre Peter Pomerantsev Diary: Sistema

Table of Contents
London Review of Books (free) All articles Julian Barnes: A Portrait of Lucian Freud Peter Pomerantsev: Sistema Deborah Friedell: Amazons Irresistible Rise Thomas Laqueur: Wrong Turn in Sarajevo Joanna Biggs: Short Cuts Michael Wood: At the Movies Marina Warner: At Camden Arts Centre Letters Table of contents