Caught in the landscape

Caught in the landscape

JONATHAN TAYLOR

Roger Ebbatson

LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE, 1830–1914

Nature, text, aura
221pp. Palgrave Macmillan. £50 (US $90).
978 1 137 33043 7

J. B. Bullen

THOMAS HARDY

The world of his novels
256pp. Frances Lincoln. £20 (US $29.95).
978 0 7112 3275 4

Roger Wardale

ARTHUR RANSOME ON THE BROADS

96pp. Amberley. Paperback, £14.99 (US $24.95).
978 1 4456 1152 5

Stephen Bailey and Chris Nottingham

HEARTLANDS

A guide to D. H. Lawrence's Midlands roots
168pp. Matador. Paperback, £9.75.
978 1 78306 057 3

In The Primacy of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty states that "the world is all around me, not in front of me". The landscape, for the philosopher, is something lived "from the inside", so that the observing self is subjectively "caught in the fabric of the world", rather than merely looking on it. In his sophisticated and ambitious book, Landscape and Literature, 1830–1914, Roger Ebbatson cites Merleau-Ponty and the critic Tim Ingold as theoretical touchstones for his own discussion of literary landscapes:

The landscape . . . is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand, taking up a point of view on our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive involvement in the landscape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as the "homeland" for our thoughts.

This notion of a "homeland" is also shared with Martin Heidegger, for whom people "must ever learn to dwell" in their landscape. The self is then "caught in the fabric of the world" – rather than observing, and hence exploiting, that world from an outside and privileged position – and for Heidegger it is poetry that lets us do this. Poetry is a "transcendent mode" of responding to nature, allowing the reader to experience the landscape from within, whereas landscape painting – arguably – presents the observer with a flat, impermeable surface. All of the literature Ebbatson discusses, including work by Tennyson, Hardy, Ruskin and Edward Thomas, seems to induce in its readers this feeling of "dwelling", of "being-in-the-world".

In Hardy's case, the feeling would seem to be particularly acute, at least according to J. B. Bullen, in the beautifully produced Thomas Hardy: The world of his novels. "Above all", Bullen writes, "Hardy's stories take us out into the landscape", sometimes not only fictionally speaking, but literally, too – to the point that a minor tourist industry has built up around the perceived overlap between real-world places and Hardy's fictionalized Wessex. "Hardy, beyond any other English novelist", Bullen writes, "has been powerfully identified with a single region", so that "scores of writers, photographers and artists, amateur and professional, have gone off in search of more and more accurate details, hoping to pin down the topography of Wessex."

Of course, Bullen's own book is testament to this ongoing fascination – a fascination which is "much more than simple curiosity", he argues. Rather, it is bound up with Hardy's dynamic conceptualization of the two-way relationship between human subjects and landscape. By "being there", readers can take the place of the fictional characters in this distinctive landscape, and become part of an "expressive relationship" between human beings and nature. For Bullen, Hardy's peculiar power as a landscape writer inheres in this "expressive relationship" – in, that is, the ways in which human subjects affect the landscape and, crucially, vice versa.

To illustrate this point, Bullen gives the example of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native, which is interpreted, he says, in human terms: in the long description that opens the novel, Egdon is personified, and "given a human face". Conversely, many of the characters in the novel are also interpreted in terms of Egdon, such as Clym Yeobright, who is "so interwoven with the heath in his boyhood" that "he was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odours". In the figure of Clym, heath and character, the landscape and the human, overlap. In Hardy's world, landscape interacts with character to generate drama. As Bullen writes, Hardy "categorised his most popular works as 'Novels of Character and Environment'"; here, the "villages, buildings, woods and fields play an active part in the plot".

The same might well be said of Arthur Ransome, the subject of Roger Wardale's lavishly illustrated Arthur Ransome on the Broads. Discussing, in particular, the settings for Ransome's popular children's novels Coot Club and The Big Six, Wardale demonstrates how the plots of these books grew out of the conjunction of fictional characters and real-life landscape. The "first hint" of Coot Club, for example, came in a letter in which Ransome stated that his next book would be "placed on the Broads, with all those rivers and hiding places in the dykes and little stretches of open water". At this early stage, he also had "five youthful characters" in mind "and one old lady". Out of the interaction of these two basic elements – characters and setting – the plot developed.

Wardale's book provides the reader with a fascinating and detailed insight into Ransome's writing process in this respect, demonstrating how a writer's "almost poetic response to landscape" can provide the germ for everything that comes after. Indeed, in this sense, it is not just the addition of fictional characters to setting which produces the plot, but, even before that, the author's own response to the landscape which can generate powerful landscape fiction. In Coot Club, for instance, Ransome was "set on turning his [own] Broads cruising experiences into fiction, and he seemed to . . . relish . . . the challenge of using a completely true-to-life setting and real-life incidents".

As with Hardy, many of Ransome's readers since seem to have wanted to experience that "true-to-life setting" themselves. One of those readers is Wardale himself. He talks about his experience of visiting the village of Horning after first reading about it in The Big Six: "When I first visited the village of Horning in the 1950s, it felt almost as if I were returning to a place that I knew well. I suspect that many have been drawn to Horning village, as I was, after reading the first page of The Big Six". Wardale's literary guidebook will delight his fellow Norfolk-bound "Ransome enthusiasts".

A similar literary guidebook – though to a very different kind of landscape – is Heartlands: A guide to D. H. Lawrence's Midlands roots by Stephen Bailey and Chris Nottingham. The book is "intended as a practical guide to the district in which . . . Lawrence grew up", specifically, that is, "the region around Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, where he grew up and lived until the age of twenty-three" – an area which he "famously christened 'The Country of my Heart'". As with Bullen's book, Heartlands argues that "visiting the sites of [the novels'] . . . creation can intensify [their] . . . impact". Bailey and Nottingham describe their book as "an invitation to approach Lawrence through his Eastwood roots, to walk with him in his 'Heartland'" – and they attempt to reconstruct Lawrence's own walks in the Eastwood district, as well as those described in Sons and Lovers and other novels. "A walk with him", Aldous Huxley said, "was a walk through that marvellously rich and significant landscape which is at once the background and the principal personage of all his novels." By tracing a five-mile route taken by Lawrence himself, for example, alongside another taken by Paul Morel and his mother, between Eastwood and the railway station at Kimberley, Bailey and Nottingham discover fascinating and sometimes unexpected resonances, connections and disjunctions between Lawrence's "teenage schoolday routine", the fictionalization of that routine in Sons and Lovers, and contemporary Nottinghamshire, with its IKEAs, takeaways and boarded-up old breweries. This is criticism-as-walking: not only is the original writer interacting with or "dwelling within" the landscape, but so are his contemporary critics.

Heidegger suggested that people had forgotten how to "dwell" – that "homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world". Clearly, as Ebbatson points out, there is an ecological subtext here: "Notions of land and presence . . . are rendered increasingly impermanent", which ultimately results in a modern sense of "placelessness". This progressive destruction of place and home haunts not only Heidegger, but Hardy, Lawrence, Ransome and others. Bullen refers to Hardy's "poetics of loss", and how his work stands as a "memorial to the continuity of rural culture where human labour moved to the rhythm of the seasons", a vanishing culture which "involves concordances and subtle reciprocities between the animate world and the inanimate one". Similarly, Bailey and Nottingham suggest that Lawrence felt acutely the changes "in the relationship of the people with the countryside", and they quote him to that effect – "When I was a boy, the whole population lived very much more with the country. Now . . . they never seem to touch the reality of the countryside" – while Wardale remarks that "Ransome championed the environmental cause at a time when only a handful of naturalists were aware of what was happening to the area". His work is a kind of "social history" which captured "the essence of the Broads" and "a vanishing way of life" before much of it was destroyed by the "overuse, ignorance and complacency" of a burgeoning tourist industry (albeit one that has derived some of its allure from Ransome's fiction).

No longer enthralled by landscape, no longer "dwelling" in it, modern human beings, it would seem, stand homelessly apart from it. What writers like Hardy, Ransome and Lawrence manage to do, as Heidegger might expect, is to reconnect their readers with the earlier, more transcendent response to nature; through their writings, readers re-learn how to dwell.

The Night of the Zeppelin

The Night of the Zeppelin

D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Frieda Lawrence and John Middleton Murry

A fragment of an unknown play by Tennessee Williams: Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence reimagined

GERRI KIMBER

Recently, while on a Research Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across the first act – ten typewritten pages, with autograph emendations – of an unpublished and unnamed play by Tennessee Williams, with two separate scenes, the first, eight-page scene called "The Night of the Zeppelin" and the second, "Armistice". The play is listed in Tennessee Williams: A bibliography by Drewey Wayne Gunn as one of the holdings in Texas, and Margaret Bradham Thornton refers to it in a footnote in Tennessee Williams: Notebooks. But the play seems never to have been discussed by scholars until now.

There are four characters in the play: Katharine [ sic ] Mansfield, John Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. Mansfield and Murry's friendship with the Lawrences is well documented elsewhere, and was significant to all four of them. Having initially met in mid-1913, the two couples became firm friends almost immediately. Both Frieda and Mansfield were technically married to other men when they first met, and the families of both Lawrence and Murry were shocked at the women their sons had taken up with. In July 1914, Mansfield and Murry were witnesses at the Lawrences' wedding and Frieda gave Mansfield her old wedding ring, which Mansfield wore for the rest of her life – indeed she was buried wearing it.

However, the relationship between the couples reached a crisis in Cornwall in mid-1916. They had been brought together by Lawrence's keen desire to found a community, which he wanted to call "Rananim", a word taken from a Hebrew psalm that their Ukrainian Jewish friend S. S. Koteliansky was fond of singing. Such was Lawrence's overwhelming enthusiasm for the project that Mansfield and Murry were browbeaten into returning to England from France, where they had just spent three blissful months in Bandol, with Mansfield rewriting "The Aloe" and turning it into what would become one of her most famous stories, "Prelude".

Of the grey granite cottage at Higher Tregerthen, near Zennor, just outside St Ives, rent £16 per annum, into which Mansfield and Murry moved in April 1916, Lawrence had written: "It is only twelve strides from our house to yours: we can talk from the windows: and besides us, only the gorse and the fields, the lambs skipping and hopping like anything, and sea-gulls fighting with the ravens, and sometimes a fox, and a ship on the sea". As Murry wrote to Ottoline Morrell from Bandol on February 26, 1916: "We are going to stay with the Lawrences for ever and ever as perhaps you know; I daresay eternity will last the whole of the summer".

Here is Mansfield's own take on life in the Cornish "idyll", in a letter to Koteliansky written on May 11, 1916:

You may laugh as much as you like at this letter, darling, all about the COMMUNITY. It is rather funny. Frieda and I do not even speak to each other at present. Lawrence is about one million miles away, although he lives next door. He and I still speak but his very voice is faint like a voice coming over a telephone wire. It is all because I cannot stand the situation between those two, for one thing. It is degrading – it offends one's soul beyond words. I don't know which disgusts one worse – when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda's hair and saying 'I'll cut your bloody throat, you bitch' and Frieda is running up and down the road screaming for 'Jack' to save her!!

This early "Rananim" was a disaster and, as Murry correctly guessed, eternity lasted barely two months. However, it remains a celebrated episode in twentieth-century English literary history; many people have written about it, analysed it, fictionalized it. Amy Rosenthal wrote a play about it, called On the Rocks, which was staged in Hampstead in 2008. I interviewed her at the time, and she said she felt compelled to write about this episode because it was so comical and so obviously doomed to fail on every level. More recently, Professor Robert Fraser has written another humorous play based on these events in 1916, called Bugger the Skylarks: Lawrence and Mansfield at war (published in Katherine Mansfield Studies, Volume 2, 2010).

Tennessee Williams openly acknowledged that he was profoundly influenced as a writer by Lawrence. Of course Williams never knew Lawrence personally, but he did correspond with Frieda. In his first letter to her, written on July 29, 1939, he wrote: "I am a young writer who has a profound admiration for your late husband['s] work and has conceived the idea, perhaps fantastic, of writing a play about him, dramatizing not so much his life as his ideas or philosophy which strike me as being the richest expressed in modern writing". Having requested a meeting, Williams visited Frieda's ranch in Taos, New Mexico just a month later, on August 29, 1939. As James Fisher notes: "Lawrence's experience connected with Williams's, whose plays were similarly steeped in representations of sexuality previously unseen in American drama . . . . As a nomadic and restless writer, Williams seemed to be seeking validation from Frieda as Lawrence's surrogate".

Williams's poem "Cried the Fox" (1939) is dedicated to Lawrence, as is the play Battle with Angels (1941). Two further plays, The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941) and You Touched Me (1945), are based on short stories by Lawrence. But perhaps Williams's best-known "tribute" to Lawrence was the one-act play, I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1941), depicting Lawrence's demise. "Tribute" might be the wrong word, however, for in his introduction to the play, Williams writes of Lawrence: "Much of his work is chaotic and distorted by tangent obsessions, such as his insistence upon the woman's subservience to the male". Norman J. Fedder remarks in his commentary on the play: "The short work . . . is, in effect, a rather uncomplimentary dramatization of these 'tangent obsessions'", since the play "consists, for the most part, of a series of hysterical quarrels between Lawrence and his wife, Frieda". Indeed, Frieda Lawrence's preface to the play is almost, in Fedder's words, "a refutation of the work it introduces". This is a complex business.

As for Mansfield and Murry, they have walk-on parts in Williams's literary life. He mentions them several times in his notebooks. On March 13, 1936, while studying a course at Washington University College on Contemporary British and American Literature, Williams recorded: "Got 'A' on Mansfield paper last night . . . . It didn't deserve such a good grade". In another paper on the "Nature of Artists", he had written: "the greatest of the moderns were afflicted with respiratory disorders: Chekhov, Mansfield died of tuberculosis". In 1937 he wrote: "Read Murry's autobiography 'Between Two Worlds' – Fascinating portraits". In a letter to Joseph Hazan of September 3, 1940, Williams commented:

Read the collected letters of D. H. Lawrence, the journals and letters of Katharine [sic] Mansfield, of Vincent Van Gogh. How bitterly and relentlessly they fought their way through! Sensitive beyond endurance and yet enduring! Of course Van Gogh went mad in the end and Mansfield and Lawrence both fought a losing battle with degenerative disease – T.B. – but their work is a pure shaft rising out of that physical defeat . . . . They live, they aren't dead.

And so to "The Night of the Zeppelin", the title clearly a reference to Lawrence's poem "Zeppelin Nights":

Now, will you play all night!
Come in my mother says,
Look in the sky, at the bright
Moon, all ablaze!
Look at the shaking, white
Searchlight rays!

Tonight they're coming!
It's a full moon!
When you hear them humming
Very soon,
You'll stop that blooming
Tune –

[Children sing on unheeding:]
Sally go round the sun!
Sally go round the moon!
Sally go round the chimney-pots
On Sunday afternoon!

Lawrence himself remembered "the war horror drifting in, drifting in, prices rising, excitement growing, people going mad about the Zeppelin raids". The first zeppelin raid in London occurred on May 31, 1915, and killed seven people. Initially the zeppelins flew too high for the anti-aircraft guns to reach them, but by 1916, incendiary bullets were bringing zeppelins down and as a result by September 1916 they were more or less phased out as a means of attack on London (with just one more raid to come in October 1917), replaced instead by aeroplanes. Witnessing a zeppelin raid in 1915, Lawrence wrote:

Then we saw the zeppelin above us, just ahead, amid a gleaming of clouds: high up, like a bright golden finger, quite small, among a fragile incandescence of clouds. And underneath it were splashes of fire as the shells fired from earth burst. Then there were flashes near the ground – and the shaking noise. It was like Milton – then there was war in heaven.

Mansfield also recorded witnessing a zeppelin raid while she was living in Francis Carco's apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs in Paris. Two zeppelins had flown over Paris, bombing areas near the railway yards. The day after the attack, on March 21, 1915, she wrote about her experience in a letter to Murry:

There came a loud noise like doo-da-doo-da repeated hundreds of times. I never thought of zeppelins until I saw the rush of heads & bodies turning upwards as the Ultimate Fish . . . passed by, flying high with fins of silky grey. It is absurd to say that romance is dead when things like this happen – & the noise it made – almost soothing you know – steady – and clear doo-da-doo-da – like a horn. I longed to go out & follow it . . . .

In "The Night of the Zeppelin", the setting is

the room of a shoddy lodging place in London, 1916. The Murrys, John Middleton and Katharine Mansfield are visiting the Lawrences. It is near Christmas. Some German cookies, made by Frieda and a bottle of wine are on a little table and there is a small artificial tree with home-made decorations. The legend, PEACE ON EARTH, crowns the tree.

In a few humorous opening lines, the four are playing charades, with Frieda and Lawrence trying to act out "Nero Fiddles While Rome Burns": "Lawrence clasps his knee, Frieda rows energetically". This first scene centres on the character of Katharine, who has by far the most lines.

Katharine: (slight and dark and feverishly bright, a radiant bird-like being)
It's something to do with boating.
John: Rowing isn't it?
Katharine: (Exultantly shrieking) NERO!
(She coughs)

As Katharine continues to cough, Frieda is anxious that she is not warm enough, but they have run out of coal for the stove – just two lumps left. Lawrence makes the point that just one torpedo cost £4,000 and that they could live on that for the rest of their lives: "And they shoot them like firecrackers". For the price of two torpedoes "we could live in ivory towers for the rest of our lives". Katharine acerbically notes, "An ivory tower on the Mediterranean. With central heating". When Lawrence starts talking of the four of them "going off and making a new life somewhere", Katharine, wearily – and not without a hint of sarcasm – gives him some suggestions: "Brighton Beach? Cornwall? . . . Avalon, perhaps".

The sound of an air raid brings such trivial discussion to an abrupt halt. John rushes out to see if it's a raid and immediately disappears into the night. Katharine asks Lawrence to "Call John back in. He loses his head whenever there is any excitement and runs around on the streets like a headless chicken". She expresses her exasperation with the war: "It's all so silly and messy. Why doesn't the kindergarten teacher make these bad little boys stop throwing blocks at each other?"

Meanwhile, Lawrence at the window admires the pyrotechnic display. Katharine, her distress increasing at John's disappearance, announces to Frieda's horror that she is going to look for him. She and Frieda tussle as Lawrence cries "It's the zeppelin!" And echoing language Williams must have remembered from his reading of Lawrence, the stage directions note: "THE SKY THROUGH THE WINDOW IS CRIS CROSSED BY SILVER BEAMS. INTO THE LIGHTED AREA SAILS SERENELY THE CURIOUS SILVER OVAL OF THE ZEPPELIN". After a detonation, Katharine, becoming hysterical, begs to be let out: "I feel stifled!" Shortly afterwards, in a long soliloquy, she exclaims: "A woman isn't really lonely, I mean terribly lonely, until she falls in love. – (And then she's alone on the desert – completely, completely alone!)". And a little further on in the same speech, in a clear reference to Mansfield's story "Bliss", Katharine says: "Frieda, did you ever see a pear tree early in the evening?… It's just like a perfect host of little silver birds had come to roost on the branches".

Katharine's anxiety over the detonations and John's absence make her cough up blood, and in another long speech she talks of her heart bleeding, not her lungs, and her youthful "mistake of believing in the possibility of things being lovely – instead of like they are". Eventually John re-enters, "breathless and hatless". Berated by Katharine for his absence, he says, "Little Kitty, I'm so sorry". Katharine's response: "Nobody's sorry. Everybody knows that this is the way of the world . . . so they grin and laugh and go running about on the streets like the bombs were April showers! – raining down May flowers!" When she reveals to John that she has coughed up some blood and that she thinks she's dying, Lawrence interjects: "I bring up blood from the heart myself now and then. All of us are dying I believe. But we're a Phoenix race, we'll rise from our ashes".

Frieda's sharp retort: "Lorenzo, quit preaching", brings the atmosphere back down to earth. "Go and get a cab, the raid is over." John carries Katharine, who, "smiling wanly and blowing them a kiss", calls out "Merry, merry Xmas!", out to the cab. Once they have gone, Lawrence comments "poor Kitty! Not a great artist, perhaps, but a fine and delicate artist. She's like that pear tree she mentioned – covered all over with ghostly silver birds". After more theorizing about the horrors of war, Frieda interrupts with the announcement that it is starting to snow, and Lawrence suddenly hears "choir boys singing carols!"

FROM THE STREET COMES THE PURE SINGING OF A BOY'S CHOIR –

"God rest ye, merry gentlemen,

May nothing ye dismay –"

CURTAIN

In the second, much shorter scene of one and a half pages, called "Armistice", the setting is exactly the same, except that this time only Lawrence and Frieda are present. Frieda is ironing as a shocked Lawrence enters the room to announce that the war is over. Frieda, ecstatic, laughs uncontrollably, as Lawrence starts to make plans for them finally to be able to leave the country. In a violent manner, "LIKE A MAN POSSESSED he capers and flings out his arms. – Stiffly, awkwardly, crazily! – He dances about the ugly little room".

What to make of this experimental fragment? There are niggling factual errors, which are hard to ignore. The last zeppelin raid in 1916 took place on September 23, three months before Christmas. Murry calls Mansfield "Kitty" but she was never, to my knowledge, called "Kitty" by anyone. Lawrence tended to misspell Mansfield's name as Katharine, hence perhaps Williams's spelling. Mansfield did not have a haemorrhage of the lungs until February 1918, considerably later than the events described here. As for "Armistice", by November 1918 Frieda and Lawrence were in fact living in some poverty in Derbyshire, having been forced out of Cornwall under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act, because of Frieda's German nationality and fears she was a spy.

And yet, there are elements that ring true: Mansfield's sharp sense of humour and her perceptiveness (though perhaps not the overt self-pity and helplessness as witnessed here); Murry's absence for almost the entire time – as was so frequently the case when Mansfield needed him – and his seeming inability to deal with "life"; Frieda's practicality and calling a spade a spade; and finally Lawrence's philosophizing about the ways of the world and how he thinks things should really be. As noted above, Williams had read Mansfield's works – including the early editions of the journal and letters – as well as Murry's autobiography, and the relationship between both couples clearly fascinated him, as it has so many other authors since.

Never having been published, this piece has been almost entirely forgotten. Mansfield scholars will appreciate the fact that Tennessee Williams centred the scene "The Night of the Zeppelin" on her character, and relish this connection to an iconic American writer.

————————————————

Quotations from play: Copyright © 2014 The University of the South. Published by kind permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the Estate of Tennessee Williams, and the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. The full text will appear in Volume 7 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, to be published in September 2015 by Edinburgh University Press.

Goncharov’s breakthrough

Goncharov's breakthrough

BORIS DRALYUK

Ivan Goncharov

OBLOMOV

Translated by Stephen Pearl

540pp. Alma Classics. £7.99.

978 1 84749 344 6

Although Ivan Goncharov was never a prolific author, producing only three novels in as many decades, his masterpiece, Oblomov (1859), has earned him a permanent place in the top tier of nineteenth-century Russian novelists. And yet, despite high praise from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who adopted "Oblomov" as a pen name in his correspondence, Goncharov has had as hard a time breaking into the canon of Russian classics in English as his titular hero has getting out of bed. Stephen Pearl's deft translation may finally give both the author and his creation the push they need.

Goncharov's sluggish progress towards recognition in English is not altogether surprising. Oblomov, a 500-page narrative centring on a stunted character whose brief, half-hearted awakening comes to naught hardly fits the mould of the Russian novel as English readers saw it at the turn of the twentieth century. It does not appear to be a novel of ideas, offering little insight into the grand universal questions of crime and punishment or war and peace, and lacking the moral weight of, say, Anna Karenina. If anything, Oblomov's fecklessness might call to mind certain of Chekhov's characters, like The Cherry Orchard's impotent Ranevskys, who let their estate disappear from under them. Indeed, it's worth noting that Chekhov himself was just beginning to win an English-speaking audience when C. J. Hogarth published the first English translation of Goncharov's novel in 1915 and a modernist sensibility more congenial to plotless depictions of intractable human complexities was taking root.

But Goncharov was not a modernist, and Oblomov is, if only in part, a novel of ideas. Russian readers were quick to recognize an essentially Russian mentality, if not pathology, in the unbudging Ilya Ilyich Oblomov – the oblomovshchina that Pearl, in his thoughtful and informative afterword, rightly calls "not just a single symptom, but a syndrome". From the time of the novel's publication, left-wing critics like Nikolay Dobrolyubov interpreted Ilya Ilyich as a type, and oblomovshchina as a national malady. Oblomov's apathy and lethargy were not to be understood as individual idiosyncrasies, but as a malignant infantilism conditioned by the institution of serfdom. Russia's barbarous feudal system allowed its landowning Oblomovs to go to seed; in turn, these Oblomovs, reliant on income from estates they cannot be bothered to visit, as well as the care of aggrieved but loyal manservant-nannies like Ilya Ilyich's Zakhar, brought Russia to a standstill. Decades later, Lenin – who was born in Goncharov's hometown, Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) – would take up this reading of oblomovshchina and apply it to his own political ends, condemning all foot-draggers on the road to socialism as latter-day Oblomovs, regardless of class origins. In Speak, Memory (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, who was never a proponent of big ideas in fiction, calls Goncharov one of the "stupefying bores" of Russian literature; he points up the "Leninist" legacy of his novel in The Gift (1939), with Fyodor protesting to a fellow émigré: "Don't tell me you have a kind word for Oblomov – that first 'Ilyich' who was the ruin of Russia – and the joy of social critics?"

Goncharov, for his part, was overjoyed by Dobrolyubov's long essay on his novel. As Galya Diment notes in her introduction, he even went so far as to claim that the critic had helped him better understand his own work. It is indeed impossible to ignore the ideas embedded in Oblomov: the conflict between ineffectual romantic contemplation, associated with the slothful "Asiatic" component of the Russian character, and productive rational action, associated with modern Europe. Goncharov presents almost too neat a contrast between the indolent Ilya Ilyich, with his iconic "dressing gown of Persian cloth, a real oriental robe without the slightest European touch", and his best friend Andrey Ivanovich Stoltz, a driven, diligent, yet kind-hearted half-German, half-Russian entrepreneur. Stoltz introduces Oblomov to a dynamic and intellectually curious young woman, Olga Ilyinskaya, and the pair fall in love. Inspired by Stoltz's encouragement and his love for Olga, Oblomov embraces a life of action, leaving his gown behind and tending to his affairs. But this new Ilya Ilyich is tragically short-lived, flourishing for a single symbolic summer. Settling back into his old ways, and into his decadent gown, Oblomov withdraws from his responsibilities and his relationship with Olga, who goes on to marry Stoltz. Oblomov, meanwhile, marries his widowed landlady, Agafya Matveyevna, spending "days on end lying on his divan, doing nothing but admire the way her bare elbows moved to and fro as she plied her needle and thread". He regresses into childhood and lives in a "kind of golden frame . . . surrounded exclusively by a circle of good-hearted, simple, loving people, unanimous in devoting their existence to supporting his and insulating him against noticing or feeling anything". It is Stoltz and Olga who inherit the future.

But if we reduce Oblomov to an exploration of social types and social forces, we will rob it of its remarkable charms, its psychological depth, and its rich ambiguities. These ambiguities – which continue to resonate with readers and trouble any schematic interpretation of the novel – haunt Oblomov's hilarious, infuriating, yet touching relationship with his manservant Zakhar, who both resents his master and cannot imagine life without him. They also haunt Goncharov's evocation of Ilya Ilyich's childhood home on the Volga, the beguilingly idyllic and disturbingly stifling Oblomovka. The chapter devoted to Oblomovka and Ilya Ilyich's relationship with his mother, which was first published separately in 1849 as "Oblomov's Dream", is a key to the novel's continued appeal, and Vladimir Korolenko's penetrating comment of 1912, cited by Diment, has lost none of its force: "Goncharov, of course, mentally rejected 'oblomovshchina', but deep inside he loved it with profound love beyond his control". This inner conflict comes to life in Pearl's imaginative translation: "Oblomov, seeing in his dream his long-dead mother, started quivering with joy and his heart contracted with a fierce spasm of love for her as two warm tears slowly slid from beneath his eyelids and hung motionlessly on his lashes. His mother smothered him with passionate kisses and devoured him hungrily and anxiously with her eyes". The blurred boundaries between dream and reality, between selfless and selfish love, lend this chapter its peculiar power, and Pearl has done full justice to its spirit and tone, occasionally choosing verbs that are stronger than Goncharov's – such as "smothered" for "showered" (osypala).

Pearl's translation first appeared with the New York press Bunim and Bannigam in 2006, largely escaping the notice of British readers. Its republication with Alma Classics should bring this masterly Oblomov the audience it deserves in the United Kingdom as well. Pearl's approach is more adventurous than that of his predecessors. His text flows naturally, capturing Goncharov's carefully modulated tone, the gentleness of his humour, and the colloquial flavour of his dialogue. Pearl is particularly adroit in his handling of idioms, and is sensitive to important differences in Russian and English usage. For instance, while describing his hero in the third paragraph, Goncharov twice uses the word dusha, which is usually translated as "soul", but occurs far more frequently than the English word and is far broader in implication, incorporating "heart" and "mind". While other translators have settled for the more literal "soul" or "spirit", Pearl offers a daring and evocative alternative, introducing the words "essence" and "being":

Sometimes an expression of something like weariness or boredom would darken his brow; but neither the weariness nor the boredom could for a minute erase the mildness, which was not merely the dominant expression of his face, but the very essence of his whole being – an essence that glowed naked and clear in his eyes, in his smile, in the least movement of his head or his hand.

Stephen Pearl has indeed caught the very essence of Oblomov.

Dads playing bop and trad

Dads playing bop and trad

Humphrey Lyttelton with a dancer, 1949

Book Details

Dave Gelly

AN UNHOLY ROW

Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–1960
176pp. Equinox. £25.
978 1 84553 712 8

The unruly post-war years of jazz in Britain

RUSSELL DAVIES

The first undisputed jazz recordings were made in 1917, so a century has not yet passed since the industrial spread of the music began. But even that thought gives no real idea of the historical compression that jazz underwent. Take the fifteen-year period covered in An Unholy Row: Jazz in Britain and its audience, 1945–1960 by Dave Gelly, the journalist, broadcaster and tenor-sax player. It ends in 1960, the year Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz heralded a decade when everything jazz had been thought to offer – persuasive swinging solos, agreed chord patterns, musical wit etc – would be jettisoned by the avant-garde in favour of a kind of informed chaos. People were asking "Is jazz finished?"

Yet the start of Gelly's era came just twenty-eight years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band went into the studio. In 1945, gramophone records spun at 78 rpm, and broke if you dropped them. Jazz still stuck to a seemingly linear course of development, though the speed of change had lately accelerated – the newest style or method being bebop, with its agitated lines and bewilderingly extended harmonies. Some young British experimenters worked their way to New York to see how "bop" was really done, and in later years, the likes of John Dankworth and Ronnie Scott would exchange memories of the musical indignities they had suffered mid-Atlantic, playing waltzes and hokey-cokey in the ballroom bands of "Geraldo's Navy". (Geraldo, alias Gerald Bright, a cockney tailor's son, was one of the better commercial band leaders of the day, but also a booking agent for ocean liners.)

Back in Britain, meanwhile, musicians of a similar age went the opposite way. Their concern was not to learn how Charlie Parker was fangling new musical phraseology in Manhattan, but to rediscover, by attempted recreation, how the New Orleans pioneers, pre-eminently King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, had chosen to express themselves on record in the 1920s. Gelly is right to insist, early in his argument, on the importance of recordings in post-war British jazz of all types. When the modernists returned from their oceanic jaunts laden with early bop masterpieces, they brought enlightenment, not simple entertainment.

But the true "record collectors" were usually to be found among traditionalists, who exchanged, at their rhythm-club meetings and published in their journals, endless questions about the minutiae of long-ago recording sessions. This still goes on. How many takes survive of such-and-such a number? Was a third cornet to be heard lurking in the ensemble? Who contributed that dreadful vocal chorus? The collectors' habit of interrogating the past had unfortunate consequences later on, when veteran American musicians began to appear regularly in British clubs and concert halls. All too often, a tired touring instrumentalist would stagger off stage and be buttonholed by a provincial jazz scholar accusing him of being the phantom slide-whistle player on some record he probably had not made, on a forgotten August afternoon in 1928.

In fact, opportunities to meet revered creators rarely arose in the period Gelly discusses, for the foolish reason that the Musicians' Union had banned American jazz instrumentalists from appearing in the UK. The Union view, passed on to the Ministry of Labour, which enforced it, was that the visitors would take work from British players. Even the uniqueness of Louis Armstrong was denied in the service of this dreary veto. When it was suggested that the Festival of Britain might benefit from Armstrong's instrumental uplift, the MU's General Secretary, Hardie Ratcliffe, rejected the proposal with an appeal to what he saw as reason: "Why do we need Louis Armstrong when we've got Kenny Baker?" Baker was powerful and a much-loved trumpet virtuoso, but he himself would have bought a ticket to see Armstrong in 1951. Two years earlier, an impudent exception to the no-Americans ruling had been contrived, and Gelly misses a trick, perhaps, in not mentioning it. Humphrey Lyttelton's band gave a concert at the Winter Garden Theatre, in the course of which the great New Orleanian Sidney Bechet (clarinettist and soprano saxophonist, or "clt, sop" as the discographies put it) was discovered in the audience, allegedly on holiday and enjoying the show. Naturally, he was "persuaded" to join the band on stage, so that the spectacle turned briefly into the showcase event it should have been in the first place. Lyttelton and his men cannot have been wholly stunned to see Bechet in his stage-side box, since they had recorded with him for the Melodisc label earlier the same day. Bechet's approach to that session, authoritarian but not wrong-headed, both impressed and amused Lyttelton and it is notable that Lyttelton's own band "got its act together", in the most literal way, shortly thereafter.

Without being burdened explicitly with the task, Lyttelton acts as a guide through these unruly post-war years. Gelly's account begins with the scene outside Buckingham Palace on VE Day, where a trumpet could be heard (still can, on a BBC recording) bleating "Roll Out the Barrel" above the tumult of the revellers. This was Lyttelton, making a precarious circuit of the Victoria Memorial in a handcart, heralding the dawn of peace. A few years later, it was Lyttelton again who, simply by giving a saxophone houseroom in his band, provoked the waving of a concert-hall banner reading "Go Home Dirty Bopper" – the most celebrated expression of the Trad vs Modernist antagonism. By the late 1950s, Lyttelton was leading a small swing band, and, as Gelly points out, this was in chronological terms the same sort of revivalism that the diehard traditionalists had undertaken. "In 1945, George Webb's Dixielanders had dedicated themselves to playing the classic jazz of twenty years before, and now here were Humphrey Lyttelton and his Band, in 1957, looking back twenty years to the swing era."

For explorers who wished to move faster, Ronnie Scott and Johnny (as he was known then) Dankworth were also useful guides. If you kept your eye on these three men, you would know roughly how British jazz was faring. Dankworth's big-band ambitions quickly made him an expert arranger, with involvements in film and television, and his domestic partnership with Cleo Laine encouraged the wider view of musical engagement which eventually acquired the name of the "Allmusic Plan". Scott kept pace with American developments, as bop moved into hard bop; he pioneered, with his nine-piece band, a take-it-or-leave-it school of stage presentation (Rule One: make every effort to avoid ingratiating yourself with the audience); and developed, through the medium of Britain's best-known jazz club, an internationalist view of the jazz fraternity. At Scott's memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields – as close to Soho as could be arranged – the critic John Fordham said in the Order of Service that Scott "would announce the arrival of performers like Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy Gillespie in an exasperated, gravelly East End drawl, as if their presence on his premises were somehow interrupting some absorbing private pursuit, like watching the racing in the back room".

The connections between personal eccentricity and musical individuality or style are extremely strong in jazz. The names suggest as much: I remember feeling as a newcomer to the genre that any art form treasuring the contributions of Jabbo Smith, Eddie Lockjaw Davis and Spanky DeBrest must be worth further research. Britons seldom matched Americans in nomenclature, though the foibles could be just as weird. Gelly celebrates several oddballs, notably Bruce Turner, the excellent saxophonist who attracted the "Dirty Bopper" protest. It is true, as Gelly recalls, that Turner called everyone "Dad", but that does not quite suggest the extremes to which he could take the habit. A fellow bandsman of his once told me that Turner's idea of a chat-up line was to loom over a young lady and hiss in her ear, "Gotta have you, dad!" – a tactic which must surely have remained perpetually innocent of success.

In each available style, there were post-war British musicians who emerged as magnificently "different" in ambition and immediately identifiable in sound – the best things most jazz performers can hope to be. Some, like the clarinettist Sandy Brown, and saxophonists Joe Harriott and Tubby Hayes, lived much too short a span, all of them still developing in their last years: Brown in the direction of African music, Harriott towards his own notion of free jazz and Hayes beginning to enjoy an international virtuosity only compromised, in the end, by drugs and general ill health. To keep up with the likes of Hayes required formidable technique, though he himself was self-taught and outspokenly proud of it.

If there was one attitude British jazz fans of most persuasions shared, it was a suspicion of music that sounded like the outcome of academic programming. It was rather like the sporting public's fondness, in those years, for productive waywardness in cricketers and footballers. Audiences favoured a kind of organic tang in their soloists and were prepared to put up with a certain amount of erratic playing in the search for it. This didn't matter too much to most jazz listeners, but among the New Orleans devotees it amounted to an obsession with "authenticity" (the watchword of their purism) and an almost moral matter.

Their theory was that the original jazz of the Crescent City – the streets, the picnics, the rudimentary dance halls – had been uprooted and taken north to Chicago and New York, where it was contaminated by the demands of showbusiness. That much was true; the argument was really about the musicians who stayed behind. They, for the authenticists, were still the guardians of the mysterious essence of New Orleans, and their work, valuing the ensemble texture over bravura soloing, should be revered and emulated. For those who contrastingly favoured the Oliver/Armstrong/Morton traditions, the stay-at-homes were limited players who knew their chances of making it in Chicago and beyond were slender. As if to prove it, some of them did venture briefly north, only to retreat to Louisiana and stay there.

Thus the charge against the British purists was that they were imitating inferior and now elderly, musicians – possibly because these unpolished results were the best they could hope to achieve. But they defended their position passionately, with the bandleader Ken Colyer as their symbolic leader. Colyer had not only spent time in New Orleans, but had overrun his shore leave there and been jailed. Sin and saintliness were satisfactorily combined, and Colyer naturally continued to follow the same uncontaminated musical path until the end of his life.

Colyer did not participate in the brief, mad spell when the "Trad Boom" elevated a music-hall parody of early jazz into the hit parade. Comical outfits, banjos and commercialism – and yet, one of the worst offenders, Acker Bilk, with his striped waistcoat, bowler hat and press agency (the Bilk Marketing Board) turned out to be a maturing soloist, whose best music was yet to be heard. Once a Colyer acolyte, Bilk survived to make affecting records with Lyttelton, among others. But that belongs to a later story, which Dave Gelly will perhaps tell. Sadly, he no longer has Philip Larkin to compare notes with, as he did in 1985. The correspondence gave rise to this rueful note, which Gelly keeps for his envoi: "During our exchange of letters I preferred not to tell Philip Larkin I was sorry to learn that he had found one particular record 'not to be jazz as he understood the word', since I was one of the players on the record in question". Larkin once wrote of the sax-man Cannonball Adderley that he "has the rare virtue of sounding neither screwball nor neurotic, yet always pushing towards excitement". He might well have said the same of this book.

Typical Greeks

Typical Greeks

"The Tomb of the Diver", National Museum of Paestum

Book Details

Edith Hall

INTRODUCING THE ANCIENT GREEKS

From Bronze Age seafarers to navigators of the Western mind
304pp. Norton. £17.99 (US $26.95).
978 0 393 23998 0

The continuous process of intercultural exchange in the ancient Near East

FRANCESCA WADE

The Cup of Nestor, found at Ischia in 1954, is an eighth-century BC vessel inscribed with one of the oldest pieces of Greek writing and the oldest-ever game of Consequences. Three lines of poetry, each scratched in a different hand, bear teasing witness to an ancient party where friends gathered to drink, laugh and compete, enjoying their shared frame of cultural reference by cracking jokes about Nestor, the staid old sage from the Iliad. Yet, as Edith Hall shows in Introducing the Ancient Greeks, the cup is also significant evidence that even by this early date, travelling Greeks were establishing networks far and wide. Our partygoers had travelled from the island of Euboea to a new trading post in the Bay of Naples, to drink wine from a cup made at Rhodes, and mark it in an irreverent game of wits using an alphabet they'd learnt from abroad: they were, in other words, "absolutely typical Greeks".

Who were the disparate group of Mediterranean peoples known as "the ancient Greeks", and how were their culture, technology, literature and thought disseminated, via Rome, down to us? Hall's answers, emerging from a very readable survey of ancient history from 1600 BC to AD 400, lie in ten broad qualities that, she argues, were shared by most of the Greeks, most of the time. This slightly contrived framework traps Hall into some dangerous generalizations. She is projecting a collective mindset, however broad, onto a huge civilization with wide gulfs between rich and poor, free and slave, man and woman. Openness to new ideas is well attested at Athens, as Hall shows, manifesting itself in the agora with the creation of democracy, and in the theatre with tragedy's examination of raw human emotions, yet the Spartan constitution was notorious in ancient legend for remaining resolutely unchanged across centuries. Other qualities from her list, particularly the Greek love of seafaring and intellectual inquiry, provide themes Hall traces fruitfully from earliest Mycenae to the Greeks under Roman dominion, in a fresh demonstration that the story of Greek culture's predominance over later intellectual tradition is, perhaps above all, the history of Greek travel.

Plato wrote that the Greeks lived "like frogs or ants round a pond", never settling too far from the sea nor venturing out too far from land. Travel brought early Greeks into productive contact with other cultures – Hall emphasizes the "continuous process of intercultural exchange" between Greeks and Near Eastern civilizations, especially the Phoenicians, with all their technological knowhow – and expanded Greek horizons in a literal sense, as a spate of colonizations in the seventh and sixth centuries extended the Hellenic world across the Mediterranean and beyond. The classic Greek symposium quickly reached the colonies: at Posidonia (Paestum in southern Italy), where the famous Tomb of the Diver portrays guests singing, dicing and embracing over drinks in a host's home, local potters began to make their own distinctive symposium pottery. A joint Greek shrine, the Hellenion, was built at a Greek trading post at Naucratis in Egypt, while at the sanctuaries of Olympia, Pythia and Nemea, Greeks came together for shared religious festivities and athletic contests celebrating another of Hall's Hellenic traits – admiration of "excellence in talented people". Gradually, ancient Greece was being formed.

Greek ideas travelled as fast as their proponents. Ionia was a trailblazer of philosophical thought: at Miletus, Hall convincingly suggests, a gradually silting harbour inspired the first inquiries into natural science. After the defeat of the Persian Empire, which had held Ionia under its sway, many Ionian intellectuals travelled to Athens, the self-appointed cultural centre of the Greek world. Later, Philip and Alexander of Macedon made a concerted effort to tempt "world-class brain-power" to court, most prestigiously securing Aristotle as tutor to Alexander. Inspired by their example, the rulers of Hellenistic Alexandria made a business out of the travelling Greek intellectual. So determined were the Ptolemies to make their Library the prime repository for Greek wisdom that they confiscated books from ships docking in Alexandrian harbours, refusing to return them until scribes had made hurried copies. The Library sponsored poets including Apollonius, Theocritus and Callimachus, the composer of sophisticated epyllia (mini-epics) who also developed the Library's catalogue system. Polybius complained that convenient library access made historians' work too easy, preferring the old-style personal adventures of Herodotus and Thucydides. But following conquest by Rome in the mid-second century BC, Greek travel became increasingly donnish. Neatly linking the Greeks of the Second Sophistic period with their classical forebears, Hall successfully demonstrates the continued flourishing of Greek thought under Roman rule, its survival enabled by the longstanding Greek penchant for travel. Since Greek remained the dominant language in the East, authors such as Diodorus, Plutarch and Polybius gave public lectures across the empire, reviving "the classical Greek figure of the travelling sophist" and becoming the first "celebrity intellectuals".

As well as up-to-date evidence and informed analysis of battles, constitutions and alliances for the general reader, Introducing the Ancient Greeks is full of colour and human touch. Hall's Spartans are not just the hardy souls who were exposed at birth if weak, forbidden to carry torches in the dark lest their guard ever lapse. They are also the wittiest of the Greeks – the word "laconic" comes from Laconia, the ancient name for the area around Sparta. Hall punctuates her narrative with spotlights on important characters (paeans to Herodotus and Aristotle; a shudder at the grisly Pontic warlord Mithridates), teasing out the interactions between individual Greek minds and their cultural contexts. There are enterprising leaders with ruthless PR strategies, from Alexander the Great, who faked the untying of the Gordian knot to fulfil an oracle affording him domination, to Ptolemy I, who maintained Alexander's stolen body as a tourist attraction in a magnificent tomb at Alexandria. Hall's Greeks remain, broadly, the traditional males who dominate our sources (three of the seven index references for "women" are under "as slaves"), though notable women are picked out for praise, including the poets Sappho and Nossis, and the democratic women of Kerkyra who attacked their oligarchic adversaries with tiles from their roofs. Hall ends on the sorry figure of Palladas, the fourth-century Alexandrian epigrammatist forced to sell his Pindar, Callimachus and even his Greek grammar, as pagan statues were melted down at Christianity's rise. Gone, but, as this book engagingly shows, certainly not forgotten.

Rome in riddles

Rome in riddles

Archangels Michael and Gabriel, Byzantine icon, tenth century

Book Details

Judith Herrin

UNRIVALLED INFLUENCE

Women and empire in Byzantium
328pp. £24.95 (US $35).
978 0 691 15321 6



MARGINS AND METROPOLIS

Authority across the Byzantine Empire
365pp. £27.95 (US $39.50).
978 0 691 15301 8

Averil Cameron

BYZANTINE MATTERS

164pp. £15.95 (US $22.95).
978 0 691 15763 4
All Princeton University Press.

Redefining the medieval history of the Roman Empire in the East

CHRISTOPHER KELLY

To be clear right from the start: Byzantium never existed. It is a modern fiction. Byzantium is the imaginative coinage of the sixteenth-century German humanist, Hieronymus Wolf. In 1557, Wolf published under the title Corpus Historiae Byzantinae a set of Greek chronicles of the history of the "Byzantine" Empire from its inception, with the foundation of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in AD 324 by Constantine – the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity – to its demise, with the city's capture in 1453 by the Ottomans under the twenty-one-year-old Mehmed II.

Wolf's neologism revived the name of the town on the Bosphorus – Buzantion – which had earlier occupied the site selected by Constantine for his new imperial capital. Constantine judged Rome too distant from the wealthiest provinces of empire (Asia Minor and Egypt), too strategically vulnerable and perhaps too committed to the old gods. Constantinople was intended as a New Rome. Neither its rulers nor its citizens ever referred to themselves as "Byzantine". In their view, they remained indisputably and unequivocally Roman. Arabic and Turkish texts echoed this claim: Mehmed the Conqueror had subdued Rum and its Christian population, the Rumis.

These claims to continuity and conquest were strongly resisted by the invention of Byzantium. To label the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean "Byzantine" after the foundation of Constantinople is to suggest that the East is somehow much less Roman than the West. Or – conversely – that it is the West which should properly be considered to be the heir of Rome's greatness. The traditional timeline of European achievement quickly tidies away a fragmented (western) Roman Empire in the fifth century, carefully preserves antiquity's heritage in medieval Catholic courts and monasteries, and loudly celebrates its liberating rediscovery in the city-states of the Italian Renaissance.

No room here for a New Rome. No place in this grand narrative for the eastern half of the Mediterranean world once comfortably part of the Roman Empire. Byzantium – Greek-speaking and resolutely autocratic – is to be severed from its Roman past and denied Rome's political and intellectual legacy. After all, there was no Renaissance in Byzantium: rather a still-born culture of stifling imitation and stultifying repetition; an ossified society of empty pomp and pointless ceremony; a failed state that was unable to defend Christendom's holiest places. It is a register of the dispiriting success of this prejudicial project that "byzantine" has established its own unflattering common currency (according to the OED): "reminiscent of the manner, style, or spirit of Byzantine politics; intricate, complicated; inflexible, rigid, unyielding".

But there is a slow recovery in progress. Byzantium – a term now so fixed in modern historical scholarship that it will not be dislodged by a mere TLS review – has undergone a quiet revolution. In the past forty years, a small group of scholars, perhaps no more than half a dozen, has offered a strikingly different view of Byzantium as a sophisticated and dynamic society with its own impressive intellectual and theological tradition deep-rooted in the classical past. Judith Herrin (Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London from 1995 to 2008) is a key member of this revisionist gang. Her significant contribution to the redefinition of Byzantium has been honoured by two volumes from Princeton University Press which reprint (lightly edited with brief introductions and some updated bibliography) twenty-five of her essays and adds five previously unpublished.

Unrivalled Influence: Women and empire in Byzantium offers a thirty-year conspectus on a project that Herrin presents as inspired by the radical feminism of her Cambridge undergraduate days in the late 1960s. Her insistent aim is the recovery of women's priorities and experiences. Her chief tactic is as a "suspicious and wary" historian. Byzantine texts are not to be understood on their own terms, but deliberately unsympathetically "read against the grain and around the intention of the male authors who created them". That approach allows Herrin, in one of her most interesting pieces, to suggest that female devotion to icons should not be understood – as some (male) theologians asserted – as proof of women's inability to grasp complex religious ideas. Rather, in Byzantine houses, icon corners, their painted panels venerated with lights, incense and flowers, demarcated a private and defiantly non-institutional space in which "women could express their belief in an unmediated, direct engagement under their own control" without the need of (male) priests.

Herrin's careful attention to often recondite material uncovers a wide range of particularly female preoccupations: with family, education, the household and (for the very privileged few at court) high politics and imperial office. She offers a welcome corrective to long-standing cartoon-like images of Byzantine women as over-sexed in public and over-pious in private. The broad patterns of empowerment and subjugation which she exposes are also familiar from the medieval West and Islamic East. Byzantium does not stand alone. As elsewhere in the Mediterranean, the position of women was established, exercised and experienced within and against the confines of a conservative, and unapologetically patriarchal, society.

A second volume of collected essays, Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire, is aimed at defeating the characterization of Byzantium as too byzantine: monolithic, unresponsive, inflexible, rigid, unyielding. Sixteen studies survey the organization and workings of Empire and Church from the provincial periphery to the urban splendours of Constantinople. Again, Herrin delights with her unpicking of unfamiliar texts and her eye for detail. Particularly pleasing is an essay constructed around a pipe organ (which provided the sonorous soundtrack for Byzantine court ceremonial) presented in 757 by the Emperor Constantine V to Pippin III, King of the Franks. A second piece takes as its starting point the Byzantine fascination with mathematical riddles. These were often packaged in an amusing narrative. For many educated Byzantines, the stark number grids of modern Sudoku would have lacked finesse: too obviously an invitation to arithmetical hard-grind. It was much more fun to puzzle over apple scrumping on Mount Helicon. How many apples did Love pick before each of the nine Muses claimed a share?

Aphrodite spoke to downhearted Love as follows: "Why, my child, do you look upset?" And he answered:

"The Muses snatched the apples I was bringing from Mount Helicon, each one taking a different share. Clio took a fifth of them, Euterpe a twelfth, while divine Thalia took an eighth. Melpomene made off with a twentieth part, Terpsichore a fourth and Erato followed with a seventh. Polymnia robbed me of thirty apples, Urania of 120 and Calliope carried away a load of three hundred. So I come to you light-handed, bringing only these fifty apples that the Muses left me.

This puzzle is just one item in a meticulous essay which traces the role of Byzantine mathematicians in copying and studying the greatest works of Greek antiquity – Archimedes, Euclid, Apollonius and Diophantus – and in the transmission of that knowledge to the West. That is the start of a long trail. In the 1630s, it was in response to one of Diophantus's propositions on number theory, now in Latin translation, that Pierre de Fermat claimed, "I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain".

Mathematics, as Herrin emphasizes, is just one example of a millennium-long intellectual engagement with ancient Greek learning. The classical past did not have to be re-discovered by Byzantine scholars. If there was no Renaissance in Byzantium, there was also no Dark Ages. Importantly, too, the transmission of mathematical knowledge (like King Pippin's pipe organ) was part of a web of diplomatic, economic and scholarly contacts that stretched across the entire Mediterranean. These connections with a wider medieval world are important. One of Herrin's most significant achievements in these essays is to lay the foundations for a history of Byzantium that is much less isolated, much less exotic and – at least in premodern terms – much more normal. At last, Constantinople can be moved closer to Rome.

Yet it is also clear that Byzantium still remains under-recognized in recent work on the medieval Mediterranean or (currently more modish) Eurasia. There has been no boom in Byzantine studies to match the recent explosion of interest in late antiquity: the Mediterranean and Middle East from the Roman Emperor Constantine to the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century. This regrettable and frustrating state of affairs is the driving concern of Averil Cameron's Byzantine Matters. This is a robust, insider critique of the field by an important and highly influential scholar with a formidable international reputation (who, before moving to Oxford, preceded Herrin in the chair of Late Antiquity and Byzantine Studies in London). At the core of Cameron's concern is the methodological tardiness of Byzantine studies, "for Byzantium is an undertheorized field as well as an understudied one". Four elegant chapters, dealing in turn with empire, identity, visual culture and religion, demonstrate with clarity and economy the extent to which too much recent work on Byzantium continues to wall itself off from new lines of inquiry that have proved fruitful in classics, medieval history and late antiquity.

And it must be said that, for all its scholarly excellence, Herrin's approach to Byzantium cannot fairly claim to be theoretically informed. Indeed, she puts "high-flown theory" firmly to one side: "I am intolerant of theoretical jargon that fails to deliver understanding of the human experience". On the whole, Herrin's work is innocent of any productive engagement with (for example) postmodernism, literary theory, ideas on pre-modern economies and state formation, identity or gender studies. Her feminism (of which she is rightly proud) is straightforward: "an analysis of the unacceptable state of affairs that arises in deeply unfair, unequal patriarchal societies in which men exploit women".

Does that matter? Of course, it would be risible to suggest that any historian's achievement should be measured principally by her attentiveness to theoretical concerns. The problem – and this is Cameron's key point – is that the deep-seated reluctance of the great majority of Byzantinists to exploit more theoretical lines of inquiry contributes to the continuing marginalization of the discipline. It sharply separates them from the common practice of historians in other periods. After all, it might be argued, only in an area as methodologically backward as Byzantine studies would it be regarded as cutting-edge to propose to read texts "against the grain".

Byzantine Matters – it must be emphasized – is not a bid to propel Byzantinists from an intellectual backwater to the forefront of postmodernism. Rather it is an impassioned and sympathetic plea to fellow scholars to be much more ambitious in exploiting ideas developed for the understanding of other premodern societies and in making Byzantium both fully part of the history of the Mediterranean and a key period in any comparative study of empire. For these projects, Byzantium matters. Cameron's feisty and provocative manifesto should immediately be placed under every Byzantinist's pillow. And it should also be read by medieval and late- antique historians. That might perhaps mitigate another of Cameron's concerns, namely that, if it is pressured to take account of wider trends, "Byzantine scholarship might turn in on itself in response".

But, in the end, Byzantium is too important to be left to balkanized Byzantinists. As Averil Cameron urges, what is most pressingly needed is a major new history and one that moves beyond the recent rush of handbooks and companions to offer an innovative and coherent approach to the medieval history of the Roman Empire in the East. Perhaps (on a smaller scale) the most profitable next step – and here Judith Herrin's solid work securely points the way – is to set the carefully recovered detail of Byzantium in a broader, comparative context. It was, after all, the tracing of a wide pattern of significance (which reached right across the Mediterranean world) which gave Byzantine brain-teasers their historical interest and importance. Otherwise, who really cares – to end the frustration of any still puzzling – that if Love had not encountered the Muses he would have left Mount Helicon with 3,360 apples?