Frost in the shade

Frost in the shade

Edward Thomas, 1916

Book Details

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

EDWARD THOMAS

From Adlestrop to Arras
496pp. Bloomsbury. £25 (US $42).
978 1 4081 8713 5

Edward Thomas's journey towards poetry

JOHN GREENING

This is the first full biography of Edward Thomas since R. George Thomas's (1985) and, significantly, the first written without the guiding hands of his widow, Helen, and children. The poet's final years have been well documented, not least by Eleanor Farjeon, and they are really the most interesting period of his life. It was not until the start of the First World War that this respected reviewer and writer on travel and nature turned his hand to poetry. He had written about it often enough (in 1917 the TLS considered him "the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry"), but conversations with Robert Frost led him to see what could be chipped from the mass of prose he had written. All this has been gone over many times and it makes a gripping story, as Matthew Hollis's Now All Roads Lead to France (2011) reminded us. A poet himself, Hollis had an instinct for the creative process and for Thomas's importance to today's poets, but he also highlighted less familiar details: the obsessive attachments to younger women, the anxiety to show he was not a coward after failing to help Frost confront a gamekeeper.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson also covers some of this, but she questions familiar assumptions as well: that Thomas was poverty-stricken, that his prose is "hackwork", that he "was a true 'Celt'", that his infatuations were passing fancies and only with women, that he ever really found "serenity and fulfilment" in the army – and that he truly loved his wife. Helen is certainly far less of a presence in this biography, and there is much evidence (some of it new) that her husband fell out of love with her very early on, felt his marriage "encrusting the soul" and was on the point of leaving her as war broke out. Wilson calls it "an unfortunate mismatch of temperaments" and can barely disguise her impatience with Helen, whose memoirs (originally published as fiction) As It Was and World Without End have, she suggests, misled biographers – most strikingly in the case of Thomas's death. It is clear from Wilson's account that his widow either conveniently idealized the way he was killed – on the first day of the battle of Arras, at Easter 1917 – or confused it with an incident the day before, when a blast from a shell knocked him over (which may have been what left the "ripples" in his pocket diary). Helen wrote "there was no wound and his beloved body was not injured". In fact, a letter from his O/C, Major Lushington, to John Moore, "buried for many years in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library", explains that he was "shot clean through the chest by a pip-squeak (a 77 mm shell) the very moment the battle began".

Such "revelations" apart, Wilson's skill lies in synthesizing earlier material, while gently pointing us towards new perspectives or ­quietly suggesting that the evidence does not quite add up. She is very good on the poet's formative years, his relationship with his Swindon grandmother (whose kitchen "could have come straight out of a Welsh village"), his fondness for the countryman "Dad" Uzzell – the model, perhaps, for "Lob" – his increasing coolness towards his actual "Dad" and even his five brothers, about whom he later could not "recall anything distinctly". Noting the "extraordinary writing out of [his eldest brother] Ernest from his childhood", Wilson makes sure we hear stories about their time together – as when a teenage Edward enraged him at bedtime by reciting Keats and Shelley.

The literary tyro knew few girls, but came to meet Helen Noble through her father, a liberated kindred spirit and influential man of letters. Wilson hardly needs to remind us that the encounter was life-changing, that Helen's pregnancy and their hasty clandestine marriage would soon threaten Thomas's Oxford career (he was already suffering from heavy drinking, an addiction to laudanum and a dose of gonorrhoea contracted during celebrations for the Relief of Mafeking). More revealing is her remark that James Ashcroft Noble "did not hesitate to dismiss Edward's attempts at verse as 'a pleasant little twitter'". It would not be poetry that dominated his next decade, but prose, those 1 million words and 1,900 reviews (on average "one review every three days for 14 years") that Thomas is estimated to have written.

If Wilson cannot quite bite her subject "to the core", perhaps no one biographer of Thomas can. The importance of his walking rather eludes her; on the other hand, we do learn that his persistent foot trouble was probably due to the fact that he preferred to walk in cheap football boots. And there are relationships that she covers more fully than anyone else – young Hope Webb, who stirred Thomas to "an extraordinary energy in writing" and is woven secretly into his book The South Country (1906), emerges vividly. Wilson appears to have read an unprecedented amount of the prose and gives us fair warning of The Feminine Influence on the Poets (Thomas called it "a wretched, wretched book"), Windsor Castle, The Isle of Wight, Norse Tales: lukewarm potboilers all. She does her best to interest us in the life of a Grub Street melancholic (although she challenges that characterization), assisted by fascinating photographs of the Thomases' many rented homes and anecdotes about literary friends such as Joseph Conrad, W. H. Davies, W. H. Hudson and Rupert Brooke. Thomas was, she writes, "most relaxed and truly [himself] in male company". But, of course, there is Eleanor Farjeon, "a short, plump, homely woman in glasses", as Wilson describes her, "who fell instantly in love with Edward" and became a "sounding-board" as well as, in effect, a secretary. Some of these friendships turned sour, and Wilson even wonders whether it was the poet Ralph Hodgson snarling at him "You damned pro-German" that finally spurred Thomas to volunteer. He left a message afterwards to "tell Hodgson I've enlisted".

Inevitably, all roads lead to Frost. Wilson raises the stakes by claiming it was "a literary friendship rivalled only by that of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Rimbaud and Verlaine, or [somewhat bathetically] Owen and Sassoon". Yet she has a point, and the myth hardens when we hear what a "miracle of chance" their meeting, in London in 1913, was. She detects similarities between the poets: both were physically attractive, had married early, were prone to depression and had experienced "a repeated sense of defeat". But she understands the differences, the rivalries, adding: "However threatened [Frost] may have felt by Thomas's extraordinarily accomplished start in verse, he rejoiced in it and offered expert, detailed advice at every stage".

Frost was almost forty, Thomas four years younger. The American poet, who settled in England in 1912, had barely been noticed when Thomas hailed the originality of North of Boston (1914), his second volume of poems, calling it "revolutionary". They spent much time walking in Gloucestershire; this was above all a friendship hammered out in the forge, to the ringing of Frost's "sentence sound", "the sound of sense", although Wilson believes that this was "only a timely expression of a position [Thomas] had also been working towards". She even quotes a fragment of verse dated a month before Frost appeared on the scene (this was first aired in the TLS, August 8, 2012) and is convinced that the American was influenced by his English friend in more than just subject matter ("The Road Not Taken" was famously inspired by Thomas's indecisiveness), that there are elements of Frost's poetic style that can be traced back to Thomas.

Wilson has wisely allowed room for substantial discussions of the earliest poems, exploring how they derived from Thomas's prose, and for descriptions of what was going on while they were written – the poet's moods as well as local or wider political events. Nor does she let us think it was overnight success for "Edward Eastaway", as he initially signed himself: "Every one of the poems sent out between March and June [1915] was returned". Unsurprisingly, the biographer of Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Charles Hamilton Sorley is authoritative on these war years, and she manages to tease out new threads: Thomas's "indulgent time" during August 1914, for example, when he makes no mention of the war, but attends the races and plans a holiday: "While Germany swept rapidly through Belgium into France in the opening days of the war, they might be sitting in Little Iddens trying to remember the words of 'Mr John Blunt' or 'Au Jardin de Mon Père'".

Vital commissions such as that for A Literary Pilgrim in England were beginning to dry up ("Who will want the thing now?") even as Thomas talked poetry with Frost and Farjeon: "Did anyone ever begin at 36 in the shade?". There is a valuable account of Thomas's vacillation before enlisting, including the research he did to "establish how the 'man in the street' was reacting to the war" for an article, "Tipperary"; and some illuminating quotations from his Life of Marlborough (written at a time of Zeppelin raids and submarine attacks) show how even in the Duke's day "Mons was besieged again and again", and how they "mined and countermined, and blew men into the air or were blown up, by hundreds at a time". But the most potent image is of "Edward Eastaway" with a bad ankle, sitting in a deckchair composing "Adlestrop" as the war entered a new year.

Wilson's account of Edward Thomas in the army is a forthright one. She does not think that he was courting death by joining up, but believes he did want to prove himself. She dismisses speculation that he might have taught Wilfred Owen map-reading. She emphasizes his initial stand-offishness with fellow recruits and concludes "the army had increased rather than diminished his class-consciousness". She draws our attention to Paul Nash's observation that far from appearing liberated, Thomas seemed "oppressed by some load of sadness and pessimism". Most intriguingly, she addresses the case of Edna Clarke Hall, whom he met just before going to France, and who is not mentioned by R. George Thomas. Wilson is understandably sceptical that Helen was really, as she claimed, "glad" to know how much Edward was enjoying his "little times" with Edna, who was "as beautiful as Helen felt sure she herself was not".

While the close reading of the poetry here does not displace Thomas's wisest commentators (Edna Longley, John Lucas, Stan Smith), and Jean Moorcroft Wilson makes no mention of more controversial critics (Craig Raine), the most useful passages in these final chapters remain those where she sets a poem against the circumstances of its composition: how, for example, Thomas's imminent departure seems to be in the very "whisper" of "Aspens" and the elegiac tone of "The Brook". A little more acknowledgement of the "Edward Thomas effect", the literary lattermath, would have been welcome. There were, after all, both immediate influences (on Edmund Blunden, who was so thrilled to think he might have found the author's own copy of his book about Keats down the side of a bunk in a stand-to billet) and later ones – in works by, among others, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell – together with at least three anthologies paying homage.

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Assads and Isis

Assads and Isis

The al-Kalaseh neighbourhood of Aleppo, November 17, 2014

Book Details

Samar Yazbek

THE CROSSING

My journey to the shattered heart of Syria
Translated by Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
288pp. Rider. £20.
978 1 84604 486 1

Jonathan Littell

SYRIAN NOTEBOOKS

Inside the Homs uprising
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
192pp. Verso. Paperback, £12.99 (US $24.95).
978 1 78168 824 3

Jean-Pierre Filiu

FROM DEEP STATE TO ISLAMIC STATE

The Arab counter-revolution and its jihadi legacy
328pp. Hurst. £15.99.
978 1 84604 486 1
US: Oxford University Press. $24.95.
978 0 19 026406 2

Charles Glass

SYRIA BURNING

ISIS and the death of the Arab Spring
156pp. OR Books. Paperback, £11.
978 1 939293 88 6

Christian C. Sahner

AMONG THE RUINS

Syria past and present
240pp. Hurst. £20.
978 1 84904 400 4
US: Oxford University Press. $27.95.
978 0 19 939670 2

'Predictable' and 'avoidable' aspects of the Syrian tragedy

LYDIA WILSON

Well into its fifth year, the conflict in Syria only seems to worsen every day, the news impossible to foresee from one month to the next, with warnings from the UN, NGOs and charities growing ever more desperate. And all the while the feelings of helplessness grow. What can we do? Or, increasingly, what should we have done? Would early intervention have been the better option, stopping, or at least slowing, the carnage, the rise of sectarianism and extreme Islamism? Should the West have dug out those moderate opposition fighters and armed the right ones? And if so, is it now too late to do so?

Meanwhile, the civilians pay the price. Syria, a country with a population of under 23 million, now has the highest number of IDPs (Internally Displaced People) in the world: around 7.6 million. One in every four refugees (almost 4 million) in the world is Syrian: 43 per cent of the entire population is displaced. Deaths resulting from the conflict are hard to verify: the UN, well known for being conservative, says that the toll has surpassed 220,000; the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the number at 320,000. UN humanitarian missions are being blocked or ignored by the regime, despite the soaring poverty levels – three out of four citizens were living in poverty by the end of 2013.

Samar Yazbek brings these horrifying statistics to life in her powerful and deeply painful The Crossing: My journey to the shattered heart of Syria, beautifully translated by Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. After fleeing to France in 2011, Yazbek made three trips to Idlib province in northern Syria, illegally crossing the Turkish border – all too easy, then and now – thus charting the changing fortunes and attitudes of the opposition forces and giving a rich portrait of this province, "liberated" from the regime early in the civil war and relentlessly bombarded by air and land in return. She charts with grief the rise of the Islamists and their claim to the revolution, which the secular idealists could only stand and witness given their critical lack of weapons to counter the foreign-funded jihadists.

A fine novelist, Yazbek makes her experiences palpable; visceral fear and anger – and pride in her compatriots – thread through the account. Her deep commitment to understanding her interviewees, along with the virtuosic prose, make her characters and their stories indelible: there is the regime soldier refusing to rape a Sunni girl and so shot in the back by his officer, a friend defecting the same night to live and tell the tale; the seven-year-old girl nightly recounting stories of injury and death in the cellar during bombing raids – "my little Scheherazade", Yazbek calls her; the two old women who refuse to seek shelter or flee with their family, reminiscent of characters in a novel by Gabriel García Márquez; the foreign jihadists manning checkpoints and the spurt of anger from Syrians at this new form of occupation.

By contrast, Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs uprising by the Franco-American novelist and journalist Jonathan Littell (translated by Charlotte Mandell), is a bare record of notes the author made during two weeks in Homs in 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his book is sketchy, and this can be frustrating. So many questions remain. Why was Littell's interpreter and photographer, Ra'id, so quick to get into arguments? Why were there sometimes other translators involved? What was Ra'id's background, given that he had good contacts and spoke Arabic but came from outside Syria? These details matter: they would explain the reactions of the fighters and others to Littell, but the reader is left wondering at the gulf between his experience with the rebels, seemingly antagonistic at every stage, and that of Yazbek, who was welcomed and appreciated for her help, despite their common aim in documenting the revolution. Is it because she is Syrian, he European? She female, he male? Is it a question of the difference between towns in Idlib province and the major city of Homs? Littell's epilogue shows one possible benefit of his approach: with hindsight, he is ashamed of some of the episodes that may well have been deleted in a sanitized, revised version, episodes that do indeed strike a jarring note (including his unexplained anger with the people who are daily risking their lives to defend their country), but perhaps give a truer version of what it is to be a European war correspondent in Syria, with all the confusion and fear and bad behaviour that can occur.

In the heat of disgust at the behaviour of ISIS, it is sobering to find evidence in both of these books of identical behaviour by Bashar al-Assad's regime, and long before ISIS broke out into the open. Burning people alive, taking women as spoils of war (especially if they were deemed heretical by the Alawite shabiha militias), widespread looting and the destruction of culture were all happening from the beginning of the revolution, and the abuses reported here are every bit as bad as those of ISIS: Littell describes in stomach-turning detail the experience of a doctor formerly in the service of the regime employed to keep people alive after horrific and repeated torture. So why does the West only respond militarily to ISIS and not to Assad's forces? The reality is that Assad beats even ISIS at propaganda, to such an extent that many don't even recognize him for what he is: an opportunist ruthlessly taking advantage of whatever group is expedient to his purpose only to turn on them when necessary, in this case using the jihadists both to fight his war against the rebels, and at the same time using their presence in the country to defend his actions to the international community, claiming his tactics are necessary for the global war on terror, an excuse used by Russia and China to block international action against his regime and more recently by Russia to build up troops inside the country. This is where Jean-Pierre Filiu's work is valuable, showing the long-established techniques of Syrian leaders which led directly – inexorably – to the formation of ISIS.

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab counter-revolution and its jihadi legacy is somewhat misnamed, being mostly structured around an analogy between four current regimes and the medieval Mamluk rulers of the Islamic world, barely mentioning, let alone explaining, the "Deep State" of Turkey (which, in Filiu's version, seems to refer to an unofficial power structure, parallel to and secret from the elected government, capable of meting out "justice" and guiding, even controlling, the legitimate leaders for the perceived welfare of the country); and on top of this there is a crucial flaw to the Mamluk analogy, but nevertheless this book is forceful and illuminating. The flaw is that the Mamluks, even in Filiu's own description, were outsiders, remaining so through strict rules concerning marriage and lifestyle. In fact, Filiu goes a little too far in stressing their foreignness to Arab culture, claiming that in over two centuries they never really learned Arabic properly, something hard to imagine. In contrast, the twentieth-century despots in the region were locally born, compatriots of the people they brutally suppressed and continue to suppress. (The fact that they are sometimes minorities of the countries – Alawite in Syria, Sunni in Iraq – has contributed to the descent into sectarian violence we have so often seen.) But, despite flaws and a certain patchiness of evidence, Filiu has produced a refreshingly nuanced analysis of the region's totalitarian regimes, distinguishing between those of his "Modern Mamluks" (in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Algeria) and other styles of suppressive ­dictatorships (in Iraq, Libya, Tunisia and the Gulf States): the dictators that held on to power in these four countries, he shows in great detail, "hijacked their independence from the hands of the actual, mostly civilian, freedom fighters", and held on to it at all costs. The intricate story of Tahrir Square leading to the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood at the polls before power reverted to the "modern Mamluks" of the army is particularly revealing, though of less relevance to the Syrian civil war than the acid portrait of Bashar al-Assad, who "follow[ed] in his father's footsteps, compensating for his minor talent through his tenacious greed".

Filiu shows that Assad was caught off guard by the demonstrations but quickly regained lost ground through the use of the Islamists he had previously imprisoned and tortured: the regime's "dramatic recovery owed a lot to the viciousness of [its] jihadi gamble that literally caught the popular uprising in a crossfire". Yazbek, observing this "double occupation" of the regime and the Islamists, delicately explores the complicity of Assad's government: why were notorious Islamist prisoners released in May of 2011, she asks many of the fighters she meets, just when the demonstrations began to get violent? The questions are rebuffed by the interviewees, but, perhaps because of this, they echo throughout the text, unanswered. The link between Assad and ISIS is laid out directly by Littell in his introduction when he draws comparisons between modern-day Syria and the Chechen revolution – with Chechnya's democratically elected government overwhelmed by Russian government-backed Islamists – as well as with the jihadists once supported in Afghanistan by the CIA. When charged with the evidence from Syria, the then French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, agreed with Littell (to his surprise), but said that "alone . . . without the participation of its American and British allies, France could do nothing". The alliance is also contextualized historically by Filiu, who shows that it was no surprise, given the previous tactics of the Syrian regime of drawing cynically on what he calls the "jihadi joker". And so when Charles Glass, in Syria Burning, says that the West is now effectively supporting Assad by bombing his enemies, he only has half the picture: Assad avoided bombing the Islamists himself while they were battling the more moderate opposition (for example, waiting for rebels to kick ISIS out of districts of Aleppo and Idlib provinces, at some cost, before sending in his warplanes: around 2,000 people died in the subsequent bombing of the ISIS-free area while ISIS had already turned its attention to expanding in Iraq), gambling on the fact that the international community would react to such an enemy. The gamble paid off. Coalition's air strikes against ISIS positions started after the declaration of the Caliphate in 2014, which, as Glass points out, sought to remove one enemy facing Assad, but only once it had helped ­decimate another.

Glass's book is an extended form of an article written for the New York Review of Books, the argument resting largely on the colonial period, in particular blaming Britain and France for the current debacle. "Think back", Glass tells the reader, confident that there can be no disagreement, "to when this mess began which was a long time before young Mohamed Bouazizi burned himself to death in Tunisia. It was about the time the British and the French decided to save the Arabs from the Ottoman Empire's oppression." This wishful picture of peaceful coexistence before the Europeans arrived is common enough among journalists and academics, but there are limitations to the narrative. It robs the people of the Middle East of their history and the historical fractures the European powers exploited, and it fails to account for the rampant nationalism seen within these artificial borders made very clear by the Arab Spring. To blame the colonialists is ultimately to deny responsibility to the people of the Middle East for their own affairs. It is old-fashioned orientalism dressed up in mea culpa garb. Filiu shows that there was indeed self-determination, but it was all in terms of the self-interest of a few, never for the general good – or, rather, what was for the general good never managed to gain or hold on to power. In this context the crushing of the Arab Spring was just the latest in a series of moves against a popular opposition to the status quo, and the covert support of Islamists just another tool in the kit.

Christian Sahner's Among the Ruins: Syria past and present is another form of witness, often expressing the same affection and grief as Yazbek, but from the perspective of an outsider, as are Littell and Glass. But instead of concentrating on the conflict itself, Sahner bears ­witness to the country as it was before the demonstrations, including factors that led to, and somewhat explain, the current tragedy. In his beautiful patchwork of recent experience and academic history, he gives a truly original portrait of contemporary Syria without shirking the social problems, physical ugliness or political realities many Westerners often want to deny. "I suspect some readers will disagree with my assessments of the importance of religious identity in Syrian history", he rather humbly and bravely says in his introduction, pointing out how many commentators blame the regime or foreign powers for stoking a sectarianism that simply didn't exist before the war, a stance his book gently demolishes. "True", he says later, "the destructive sectarianism the world has witnessed in Syria recently is something new, but it seems clear that . . . sectarianism is appealing precisely because it builds on pressures that have existed in Syria for a long time."

Sahner gives a long historical arc, going back to pre-Islamic, Byzantine Syria, before going on to produce a moving and highly readable account of the country today. His close attention to the buildings and geography of Syria, together with accounts of his many friendships, bring the country into sharper focus than textual sources alone can do. In one scene he walks through the Christian area of Bab Touma in Damascus, describing the churches he passes. As he goes, he explains their presence and position in the Old City: the first Caliphs to make Damascus their capital, the Umayyads, decided to demolish the big basilica in the centre of the city. The Christians negotiated with their new rulers, and were compensated with land granted in perpetuity in another part of the city – land where four churches still stand (though they are not the original buildings). This was canny of the Caliphs: Christian worship and hence much of its culture was pushed from the middle to the edges of Damascus in a move construed as gracious and generous to the conquered population. Sahner uses this background to explain various conversations he has had with contemporary Damascene Christians, digging beneath the "rosy picture" of Muslim–Christian co-existence to find that "much was left unsaid"; in particular, he writes, the construction of the old city now gives the impression of a "very gentle siege". His affection for the city never blinds him: "In 2008, Damascus seemed less like paradise than urban purgatory: from high above, she was a mash of satellite dishes and grey tenements, an expanse of concrete slowly consuming all trace of green on the desert fringe".

History is not only practised by scholars seeking to understand the present, but also by politicians wishing to shape it; we see the effects in Shakespeare's history plays, or Israel's politicization of archaeological sites, or in ISIS's expositions of Islam in the time of Muhammad. As Sahner says: "Ancient history can be a hobby of . . . the kinds of people who profit from tracing the political present to a distant, unknowable past . . . . It's also a way of excluding those deemed not to belong". His account brings us up to the present, complementing Filiu's more broad-brush picture of the Assad regime with descriptions of the social effects of the security state created by Hafez Assad and now maintained by his son. A conversation with a friend sheds light on "the most tragic side-effect of Syria's security state: the decay of civil society, of the invisible bonds that create an esprit de corps among a people". This is just one factor in the descent into a multi­faceted civil war that Christian Sahner explores in his subtle book.

Nothing about the twentieth-century history of the Middle East was inevitable, although ­historical retellings often make it seem so. As Jean-Pierre Filiu says in his conclusion: "The unfolding of such disasters in the Arab world was both predictable and avoidable". Read together, these books complement and contradict each other not only to give a composite ­picture of the conflict, but also to show the numerous ways in which this region is (and has been) interpreted, for good and for ill, and of the ideologies that continue to dog the Middle East, from within and without.

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Too high a bill

Too high a bill

Refurbishment of the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, March 31, 2010

Book Details

Andrew Sayer

WHY WE CAN'T AFFORD THE RICH

414pp. Policy Press. £19.99 (US $35.95) .
978 1 4473 2079 1

Inequality is a growing problem but the solution is far from clear

EDWARD N. LUTTWAK

For a reviewer, no sin is greater than to cite one's own work when one is supposed to present another's, especially a book as substantial as Andrew Sayer's Why We Can't Afford the Rich. But sin I must, because it is important to recognize that the discovery around 2013 of the long-term trend towards increasing inequality (I time it by the huge response to Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century) was anticipated as early as 1993, both in my own work – as a very part-time economist – The Endangered American Dream, and by others, more qualified no doubt. These books were well published, politely reviewed for the most part – and yet utterly ignored in political reality, even though the simple argument was documented, perhaps over-documented, with a relentless parade of statistical series centred on the deflated hourly pay rates of non-farm, non-supervisory employees in a whole slew of industries.

They demonstrated that by 1977 or so, the long-term increase in the hourly wages of American employees – the very engine of the American Dream – decelerated and then practically stopped. Separating out overall averages, it emerged that hourly pay rates were no longer growing even in the best-paid sectors, such as mining or the unionized car industry, while there was a concurrent decrease in the numbers so well employed. Unemployment was not rising in the United States, because there were fewer European-style rigidities, legal or cultural, and fewer unemployment benefits, and the minimum wage is set low; so that instead of European unemployment levels, in the US low-paid employment could keep expanding in retail trade, fast food, private security and such. But the drop from manufacturing pay rates to such service pay rates was huge, at least a 4:1 difference, one that implied entirely different ways of life: the former with house, pick-up truck and children in higher education; the latter with parental or rented lodgings, a battered car, and nothing else.

That seemed very alarming, because by 1993 the sinister immiseration process had outlasted any possible cyclical or otherwise temporary causes, while the sovereign remedy insistently proposed (as it still is, by the statistically ­ignorant) – increasing skill levels, was clearly a non-starter because well-paid work itself was migrating away, and because people earning a few dollars per hour would not be able to educate anyone, let alone employees for companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google or Facebook (whose total employee numbers in any case remain modest as compared, notably, to WalMart's 1.4 million employees in the US alone).

It is true that high-tech pay rates were and are even higher than the highest industrial wages of old, indeed much higher, so that in high-tech regions Victorian employment patterns have been re-created: too-busy-to-live high-techies employ retinues of nannies, housekeepers, dog walkers, cat-minders, pool boys and personal shoppers. None is of course called a servant, certainly not by their employers, but the economic and thus the social gap is even larger than it was in the days of under-parlourmaids, because no personal-service job, however well paid, can begin to compare to stock-option earnings, which can of course make even doctors and lawyers into the equivalent of under-parlourmaids.

The new American servant class, moreover, is very much better off than most of those who work in impersonal service jobs, because for every hedge fund executive, there are vast numbers of near-minimum wage employees. In most parts of Europe where such jobs are ­precluded by high minimum wages, there is instead chronically high unemployment, with more of it now in the superimposed cyclical ­crisis, and still more in such places as Sicily's Bagheria, where the official 40 per cent unemployment rate is thoroughly misleading in both ways: first because some of the listed unemployed works in the black economy (which pays poorly, however), while the employed are in large part the useless or counterproductive employees of the municipality, province, region or state.

Worse still, when classic industrial employment disappeared in urban centres, such as Baltimore or Rochdale or Thionville, nothing could replace it, except welfare dependence and all its unlovely corollaries that go unnoticed but for the occasional outbreak of violence. Much less dramatically, but much more significantly, the long-term slide in earnings is manifest not just in certain benighted streets of Baltimore, Rochdale or Thionville, but across the breadth of society in the United States, as well as in most parts of Europe. The consequences are both concrete and measurable, as well as invisibly corrosive until they emerge in the form of increasingly immoderate political preferences: in the US within the Republican and Democratic coalitions, in Europe in distinct political parties variously labelled as populist or xenophobic, but certainly anti-European, (i.e. anti-system).

In the US, the accumulated consequences of declining or stagnant earnings are measurable in family net worth averages: between 1989 and 2013 (which comprises both "boom" and "bust" years), the inflation-adjusted net worth of the median family of each of the four racial or ethnic groups were: non-Hispanic whites, $130,102 and $134,008 (that is, a wealth increase of around $4,000 in twenty-four years, very much less than in past periods since 1776); starting lower down, Hispanics of any race did better relatively at $9,229 and $13,900, but that number cannot comprise owned housing except in fringe areas; non-Hispanic blacks, $7,736 and $11,184, remain at the bottom of the pile, and are mostly lodgers, not householders; Asians and other minorities did much better at $64,165 and $91,440.

These numbers come from a much less ­radical source than Andrew Sayer's declaredly radical work: the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis (William R. Emmons and Bryan J. Noeth's "The Middle Class May Be Under More Pressure Than You Think", online at stlouisfed.org). Their implication, however, is decidedly radical, nothing less than the end of the American promise of ever-increasing prosperity.

As for the causes of the epochal change, even back in 1993 there were several different hypotheses. The most obvious was the increasing integration of advanced economies with lower-wage economies, or globalization, a term still new in those days (as the then chief executive of Caterpillar put it, why should our US workers earn more than our Mexican workers?). But that was also the only argument that was disallowed, because professional economists could only shudder at the ignorance of those who did not know their David Ricardo, and therefore did not understand that Free Trade is always better for all, given that each time a barrier is removed, the many bene­ficiaries can easily compensate the few losers. Among my reviewers, it was the eminent Robert M. Solow (in the New York Review of Books) and the already well-known Paul Krugman (in the purpose-written Pop Internationalism) who mocked the crude intellectual error of blaming globalization, and both thought it irrelevant that compensation for freer-trade losers is not actually paid at each remove, that being irrelevant to the validity of the theory.

Where I and others more qualified, such as Robert Reich in The Work of Nations (1991), came up short was in offering remedies, because, while blaming freer trade, I was not about to recommend autarky; while Robert Reich, on becoming Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor in 1992, was entrapped in the false "up-skilling" solution. Nor was I ready to support sharp tax increases to redistribute income, let alone wealth, if only because I would have been a redistributor rather than a redistributee.

Things are different now, because in most industrial countries inequality in itself has become the central issue rather than the processes that generate it – because there is no longer the hope of redirecting them – and any number of policy remedies can now be proposed by those like Andrew Sayer who argue that when the 1 per cent takes all the growth, the remaining 99 per cent should use their vote to take it back, or some of it, at any rate, by voting for politicians who will do it for them. That is what the book is about, and Sayer proceeds very systematically with arguments that may be disliked but which are internally coherent, and with facts that are excessively selective at times but not dubious in themselves. Most important, Sayer does not invent economic mechanisms in the way that populists often do, never forgetting that cake-making must come before cake-distribution, even while rejecting each version of the argument that redistribution inhibits growth.

After taking 118 pages to demonstrate that the rich take too much of total wealth in ways that most people view as legitimate, indeed as desirable in principle, but which Sayer deems unjustified (e.g. "Shares and dividends: a bizarre institution"), using the dread word usury along the way, after focusing on the evils of rentier incomes, he arrives at the standard objections to redistributive policies. Proceeding systematically, he starts with "don't the rich create jobs?", answering that in fact they destroy jobs because if poorer people in greater numbers had their money, they would consume more. Aware that supply is also needed, which in turn requires investment, which requires wealth, he answers the objection by first praising entrepreneurship as wealth-creating but then arguing that pressures to deliver "shareholder value" (any mix of appreciation, buy-backs and dividends) inhibit the innovative risk-taking that makes entrepreneurship valuable.

Next he notes the concrete value of social entrepreneurship (a cycle club can add value), and then argues that the state (adding "yes, the state") can also be entrepreneurial, mentioning the creation of the British National Health Service; but he notably fails to give examples of state enterprises that use the taxpayer's capital efficiently, which are indeed surprisingly hard to find, given the immense number of state enterprises world-wide. It is remarkable in how many of them the employees diminish the people's wealth even without theft (all too common) and without corrupt giveaways ( a simple device, but it made many a Russian oligarch), by simply paying themselves too much perfectly legally. In South America, for example, state-owned entities commonly pay a double aguinaldo, the second salary paid for the Christmas month of December, which thereby becomes a triple salary.

Thus Andrew Sayer fails to note that rather important extra way for the richer than average to become richer, if not very rich: the average pay rates of state-owned enterprises are almost always higher than non-state pay rates, often much higher. And things become worse when the state subsidizes private or institutional activities, which invariably redistribute upwards, sometimes egregiously: a few years ago, it emerged that the Buenos Aires Opera, whose ticket prices are high and thus bought only by the relatively wealthy, nevertheless received a subsidy of US$100 million for a major refurbishment, i.e. all Argentinians were paying for a few rich opera-goers (by comparison, the Royal Opera House in London received £26 million in 2013).

Of course the Buenos Aires Opera is a mere bagatelle as compared to the redistributive effects of the global warming panjandrum now raging across the world, from the especially afflicted West Coast of the United States all the way to China: it is a very powerful way of impoverishing the poor while enriching the rich both broadly and very narrowly: who gets to receive solar-panel installation credits? Certainly not Baltimore lodgers or Thionville denizens of rent-controlled HLMs (habitation à loyer modéré). Who gets to buy subsidized hybrid cars and super-subsidized electric cars? Certainly not those driving older second-hand cars, or none. Narrowly, i.e. when state money is given to specific companies "to fight global warming", things are much worse: the billionaire owner of Tesla cars was given $1 billion or so to produce its fancy electric cars that only a few of the subsidizing taxpayers could ever buy, and that is normal because all known environmental restrictions and initiatives redistribute from the poorer to the richer, but the rather "green" Sayer does not pursue that track. Indeed, in his global warming paragraphs, he takes the highly conventional view that proving global warming is man-made is the same as proving that it must be stopped, without even trying to calculate benefits as well as costs (Canada and Kazakhstan could feed the world, etc), these being things worth looking at given the global redistributive effect of global warming policies, most recently ruining the livelihoods of American coalminers.

To reach his conclusion, Sayer proceeds systematically through all the objections. After addressing the innovators' claim to great riches, citing the vacuum-cleaner entrepreneur James Dyson as well as Steve Jobs et al, incidentally noting their propensity to export jobs to overseas plants, he concludes that they deserve two cheers and millions, not three and billions. He replies to the argument that the rich will emigrate if taxes rise by noting that very rich Norwegians stay and pay, as do some Swedes, so that rich Londoners would do the same rather than live in Dubai down the road from Islamic State. Philanthropy is dismissed on the grounds that the state should provide, and his penultimate point is that inequality causes ill health.

At the very end the prescriptions are uncompromising, indeed extreme in their totality, but again very well presented in detail. Sayer wants not only steeper income tax tables, but also substantial and very progressive wealth taxes, to which he would add Piketty's "exceptional" tax, a one-time levy (a huge one) to pay off national debts and unburden fiscal regimes everywhere (he does not pause to contemplate what profligate legislators would do without the national debt to restrain them), stiff inheritance taxes, and much higher corporate taxes regardless of inter-company transfers, all of the above preceded by global bank data-sharing so that fiscal authorities everywhere would know who has what, as the Internal Revenue Service in the United States mostly already does (it also has a functioning court system to deter evasion by swift imprisonments, a thing mostly impossible elsewhere).

I of course oppose Sayer and will resist redistribution in any way I can, but must recognize that what was politically premature in 1993 has now arrived. David Cameron's victory, amply justified by bold economic growth policies nevertheless had to overcome the inequality argument, which has now propelled Corbyn's improbable rise, while Hillary Clinton's royal progress has become a ragged scamper as the Socialist Bernie Sanders forges ahead (desperate, she abruptly turned on the fat cats that have lavishly funded her family, her family's non-profit profiteering, and her own campaigns). Even Republicans are talking about wage stagnation, with some pursuing the argument into Andrew Sayer territory – without the wealth tax, of course.

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Wrong for the poor

Wrong for the poor

Ottmar Hörl's sculptures of Karl Marx, Trier, Germany, 2013

Book Details

John Plender

CAPITALISM

Money, morals and markets
334pp. Biteback. £20.
978 1 84954 868 7

Thomas Piketty

THE ECONOMICS OF INEQUALITY

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer
160pp. Belknap. £16.95 (US $22.95).
978 0 674 50480 6

Anthony B. Atkinson

INEQUALITY

What can be done?
400pp. Harvard University Press. £19.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 50476 9

Paul Mason

POSTCAPITALISM

A guide to our future
340pp. Allen Lane. £16.99 (US $27).
978 1 84614 738 8

A clearer alternative to Thomas Piketty: and the problem when capitalists make nothing but money

PAUL COLLIER

There are many people who find capitalism morally offensive. Perhaps the overriding reason is an unease at Adam Smith's proposition that the consequence of an economic act cannot be inferred from its motivation. Are our true benefactors the entrepreneurs who, driven by greed, unintentionally enrich us? Then there is capitalism's reliance on the market model, which belittles co-operation: communities, it is argued, would be happier if self-sufficient. A variety of other objections follow: capitalism contaminates our sense of value. Its inequalities of wealth create imbalances of power: between workers and capitalists, or between special interests and the common good. Capitalists are exploitative, hijacking the fruits of labour. From Aristotle to present-day Islam, some have regarded a reward for waiting as undeserved. The rise of consciousness about sustainability has opened a new ­critique: capitalism is environmentally unsustainable because it plunders the planet, and socially unsustainable because the accumulation of capital leads to ever-widening inequality. Finally, since 2008, the post-1929 critique has been revived: capitalism is condemned on its own metric as inefficient.

In thinking coherently about capitalism, a helpful starting place is to ask yourself this question: why are poor people poor? Discussion of poverty circles around three answers. Firstly, some people have become rich at the expense of others; secondly, people are poor because they have been unlucky; or, thirdly, because they have made poor choices. The first would require restitution, which would in turn imply striving for equality: the poorest people must have been robbed of most, and the richest must have stolen the most. The second, ill-luck, would require social insurance. As proposed by John Rawls's principle of Maxi Min, the priority would be to raise the floor. The third explanation, poor choices, poses the options of indifference or compassion. These three rival analyses lurk beneath all discussion of inequality. The passion of the Left is driven not by belief that social insurance would be valuable, but by anger at perceived wrongs. The contempt of the Right is driven not by concerns about the disincentive effects of social insurance, but by anger at the prospect of rewarding the foolish at the expense of the prudent.

Determining which of these rival positions best accounts for poverty is an empirical matter. In the Britain of the nineteenth century, the first was reasonably persuasive, but it is no longer so in the twenty-first. The appropriate agenda is now a social insurance floor and compassion. As to poverty at the global level, none of these three accounts has much traction. Overwhelmingly, the answer to why poor societies are poor is that they lack the organizations of modern capitalism. Capitalism has created organizations that harness the productivity potential of scale and specialization without triggering the alienation predicted by Marx. Marx thought that large-scale production inevitably separated enjoyment from labour, and that specialization "chained [man] down to a little fragment of the whole". Ironically, the consequences of alienation were most devastatingly revealed by industrial socialism. Modern firms maintain motivation by a judicious combination of incentives and a sense of purpose: workers internalize the objectives of the firm. From the entrepreneur to the car park attendant, people get job satisfaction from what they do, not just from what they earn. Being subject to the discipline of the market, firms that fail to create such work environments go bankrupt.

The Achilles heel of modern capitalism is the financial sector. In recent years, this sector has radically skewed its model of motivation towards reliance on incentives. Perhaps this was because performance appeared to be so readily measurable, but it is very difficult to design incentives to reward what is really desired. Asset managers are well rewarded for short-term performance, as a result of which they judge the firms in which they invest on the same criteria. Gradually, this has come to infect the way in which the CEOs of non-financial companies are rewarded. Over the past two decades, the ratio of CEO pay to the average pay of their workforce has widened in the USA from 20:1 to 231:1 (with banks themselves leading the way with a ratio of 500:1). In turn, this infects the way that firms are run. Directly, the widening of differentials has made it harder for firms to maintain the commitment of their workforce. Indirectly, it has tempted CEOs into dysfunctional balance sheet tricks: profits are at a peak, while investment is at a trough.

The resort to exclusive reliance on incentives may also have been because the intrinsic incentives have become threadbare. The mission statement of Lehman Brothers, "we make nothing but money", hardly invited devotion to the greater good. The approach perhaps inevitably backfired: the culture of an organization that thought this a fit statement of purpose ultimately licensed its workforce to work for their individual interest. But the problem of misalignment of private and social incentives is more fundamental. Smith's proposition that the market does a good job of aligning them, while true for many markets, is often seriously wrong in financial markets. A gain made by one asset trader is matched by the loss borne by another. Such trade is not socially useless, but its social value bears little relation to the private returns. The main social value of trading in financial assets is that it makes the underlying investment in the real asset more liquid, and so more attractive than if it were held forever. This is an important value, but the private returns to trading, typically driven by tiny informational advantages, generate far more trades than are needed for liquidity. At the margin, the social value of trading approaches zero. A similar process is at work in a legal dispute. The rule of law is a huge public good, but no commercial lawyers are working to achieve "justice": they work to win a case in a zero-sum tournament. The last hour of legal effort purchased by a party to a legal ­dispute yields its return not by generating more justice, but by increasing the chances of winning the tournament. There are simply too many people spending their time on these zero-marginal-social-product activities. Worse, many of them are highly talented. In Britain, some of the brightest brains are diverted to the City from activities such as innovation, where the marginal social returns are far higher than the private returns, because innovations can be imitated. In their hearts, many of these people recognize that while enriching themselves they are not enriching society: they quit and do something more satisfying.

The four books under review all reflect the current disquiet over capitalism but in ­radically different ways. John Plender is a financial journalist of long standing. The journalistic practice of close observation has been the key missing skill among academic economists, and it partly accounts for why we failed to foresee the global financial crisis: we did not realize the extent to which the banks had geared up on their asset base. Plender's account of the modern City is at the core of Capitalism: he suggests that, to date, insufficient measures have been taken to prevent a repeat of the crisis. But his account is considerably enhanced by being placed in the much wider historical context of moralizing about markets: in Capitalism, Aristotle and Marx rub shoulders with the recent bank CEOs. Plender also provides a nice account of the evolution of entrepreneurship: and, yes, many of these people are our true benefactors. His book is balanced, well written and not self-aggrandizing. I recommend it.

Thomas Piketty's recent analysis of wealth and growth, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (reviewed in the TLS, June 27, 2014), is an important thesis that, barring catastrophes, wealth takes an ever-rising share of income. A book by Piketty on inequality sounds like an important event. Unfortunately, although just published in English, The Economics of Inequality is actually a prequel written in 1997, presumably now translated opportunistically. Piketty's ostensible thesis here is that disputes about inequality are largely based on a lack of understanding of economics. But his underlying critique of capitalism is that it is socially and morally intolerable because the rising ratio of wealth to income generates ever-rising inequality. This depends on both technical and moral assumptions. Technically, he assumes that the return on capital remains indefinitely at around 4.5 per cent, and accrues to wealth owners. Yet the return on capital is currently much lower, and the deficiencies of modern corporate governance have enabled managements to transfer much of the return from wealth-owning shareholders to CEOs and asset managers. This is one reason why pension funds are in such trouble. Morally, he assumes that the inter-generational transfer of wealth is a "lottery of birth" to be corrected by taxation. But characterizing inheritance as a lottery is an abuse of metaphor. The inter-generational attachment within families is a bond more powerful than any other form of social attachment. Framing humanity as merely two entities – mortal individuals and infinitely lived society – may be the stuff of economics textbooks, but for many people inter-generational family trumps both. This is not to vindicate, but certainly to complicate, the morality of inheritance.

Piketty also discusses whether redistri­bution can be "efficient". That is, would the redistribution of £1 from the rich to the poor cost more or less than £1? "Pure" redistribution would cost £1, while "efficient" redistribution would cost less than £1: for example, initial assistance in a job search might enable a person to get a more productive job. So much of economics is about efficiency that to economists this appears to be a central distinction: a move to efficiency is potentially "Pareto­improving" – in principle, everybody could be made better off. We are trained from economic infancy to think of Pareto outcomes to be potentially superior. But it is hard to think of why the efficiency issue might actually matter: in either of the cases sketched above, one person gains £1, and whether the other loses 90p, £1, or £1.10 is unlikely to be decisive. While, at the time it was written, Piketty's book on inequality was valuable, if you are sufficiently interested to think of reading it, I recommend that instead you read Anthony B. Atkinson's Inequality: What can be done? Unless I have missed something, Atkinson's book incorporates everything that Piketty has and a lot more. I suspect that Piketty, who has worked extensively with Atkinson, might agree.

Within its own terms, Atkinson's book is magisterial. It is the definitive analysis of inequality in Britain and how to reduce it, as viewed through the standard professional economics prism of Utilitarianism. While grounded in sophisticated theory and state-of-the-art quantitative evidence, the book carries through to specific policy recommendations on standard matters such as tax rates, benefits and tax reliefs. More ambitiously, it proposes guaranteed employment for job seekers by unrestricted recruitment into the public social sector, and that fiscal incentives should be used to skew technology away from labour-saving innovations such as robotics. I do have qualms both about these ambitious proposals and about the Utilitarianism on which the entire analysis is implicitly premissed. A guarantee of employment in the public social sector is neither necessary, given current levels of unemployment, nor desirable. Inadvertently, by turning social work into the sump sector, it would undermine it as the chosen profession of many dedicated people. More than most jobs, the quality of social work depends on personal commitment. As to skewing technological change, while conceptually neat, it is scarcely the domain of practical policy. The pace of robotics innovation is a global phenomenon set not by the British Treasury, but by companies in the USA, Japan and China.

My deeper concern is that the Utilitarian calculus of inequality used in economics is indifferent to desert. A transfer from anyone on a higher income to anyone on a lower income is welfare-improving regardless of how their respective incomes came about. As a result, the key to tackling inequality appears to be to redistribute huge amounts of money in the middle of the income distribution, because this is where the numbers of people are largest. We return to the Britain of 1977 – the most equal recent year – through higher taxes on doctors and headmasters, and lower taxes on postmen and bus drivers. Yet I suspect that when people say they are "concerned about inequality", this is not what they have in mind. Rather, people feel angry about those high incomes that they perceive to be undeserved. While the old ­distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor is barren, since even those poor people who are entirely responsible for their condition have to be helped, that between the deserving and the undeserving rich really matters. Applying the same marginal tax rate to a doctor on £160,000 and a CEO on £5 million will increasingly be questioned, even though it is of no consequence for inequality as measured by economists.

Paul Mason is entertaining, but predominantly in ways that are unintended. His title, PostCapitalism, says it all. Mason is a Marxist of the school that in the 1980s was writing about "late capitalism". If Atkinson has written the book that Ed Miliband would have wanted, Mason is for Jeremy Corbyn. The Marxists have never quite got over the fact that the 1980s actually turned out to be the period of late socialism. "Post-capitalism" is one stage more messianic than "late capitalism": yes, capitalism as we know it is being crushed by the weight of its own contradictions as the zero marginal cost economy of the internet drives it to oblivion. The sharing economy of Wikipedia is the future, and Mason hyperventilates about it. That industries with marginal costs below average costs have been around since the 1840s (railways) is not mentioned. That internet applications such as Uber and Airbnb seem to be bringing masses of people into the market goes unremarked. Wikipedia is exciting, as are many other non-market aspects of the sharing economy such as common housing schemes and craft collectives. But they are outcrops of the prosperity generated by markets, not alternatives to them. No matter; Marx is Mason's great guide, and a once missing fragment of his work brilliantly presages the new economy of the internet. There is a sad discourse on why the working class let Marx down. But dismay can be tempered by the new and more reliable army of liberation: techno-nerds. We are given a whole chapter devoted to the labour theory of value. And the great tide of history is with us: Gaza, Greece and the SNP are all part of the same new political movement: you will be reassured to learn that the SNP "was not a nationalist surge". Whatever underpins such thought processes, it is not intellectual. More plausibly, it is a psychological craving for an oppositional identity. Mason is now the economics editor for Channel 4 News. That he got this job despite never having studied the subject may suggest how its management prioritizes infotainment.

Aspects of capitalism undoubtedly need to be addressed. But the undeserving rich may consist less of capitalists than of powerful managers: corporate governance needs to be rebalanced, perhaps on the German model in which societal interests are represented on supervisory boards. Similarly, the useless rich may consist less of the idle descendants of ­capitalists than of smart people wasting their lives in those sectors where at the margin activity is socially rather unproductive. These sectors need to be downsized: we were right to do it with coalmines; we should do it with the City. In Britain the nostalgic narrative that the poor have been wronged should be put to rest. We need an effective floor of social insurance and compassionate policies that are effective in ­lifting people out of poverty traps. As to global poverty, whatever the problems of poor societies, overdosing on capitalism is not one of them.

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Tagore’s earthly powers

Tagore's earthly powers



Book Details

Rabindranath Tagore

CHIRAKUMAR SABHA (THE BACHELORS' CLUB)

Translated by Sukhendu Ray
217pp. Oxford University Press. Rs450 (£24.99).
978 0 19 809944 4

Amiya P. Sen, editor and translator

RELIGION AND RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Select discourses, addresses, and letters in translation
242pp. Oxford University Press. Paperback, Rs495 (£29.99).
978 0 19 809896 6

The rational spirituality that drove India's literary Nobel Laureate

RINKU CHATTERJEE

"Great books", as Michael Crichton once observed, "aren't written, they're rewritten." A conscientious littérateur, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) evidently believed in the efficacy of revision. He reworked the idea behind The Bachelors' Club through several genres – novel, story, satirical sketches – for more than two decades, before finally publishing it in its final form as a play in 1926.

Even without knowing this, the reader might be justified in seeing Tagore's drama as a rewriting of Love's Labour's Lost: it tells of three young men called Bipin, Shrish and Purno, who vow to follow the example of their leader Chandra Babu by remaining celibate and dedicating themselves to social causes. They do not, however, have any concrete plans for achieving anything. Removed from practical life, their half-baked theories are, at best, farcical; their aim is to eradicate poverty from India, and they contemplate manufacturing matchboxes as a good way to begin. As they while away their time bandying lofty rhetoric, an erstwhile member of the club, Akshay Mukhopadhyaya, now happily married to Purobala, contrives to effect matrimonial alliances between his two sisters-in-law, Nripabala and Neerabala, and Bipin and Shrish, at his wife's insistence. Helped by his brother-in-law, Rasik Chakravarti, an elderly bachelor, and his widowed sister-in-law, Shailabala, who joins the bachelor's club pretending to be a man (Abalakanta), Akshay achieves his aims after a series of comical incidents, which includes driving out unwanted suitors. The seemingly most steadfast bachelor of the club, Purno, falls for the charms of Nirmala, Chandra Babu's niece, thereby giving the play a comedic ending promising multiple marriages.

Although it has the tropes of a romantic comedy, The Bachelors' Club is essentially satirical in tone. Emerging at a time when women were beginning to play a greater role in urban social life, it raises some important questions about the relationship between men and women in the public sphere, as illustrated by Nirmala's impassioned plea for the right to be included in the club: "Those other members who are apparently dedicated to serve the country, who are prepared to renounce the worldly life and yet cannot openly accept a woman, equally inspired by the same spirit of service, as a member, I suggest they better remain family men". The well-educated and otherwise eloquent men, who regularly engage in intellectual debates, display a complete ignorance about the proper etiquette of interaction with young women, and are reduced to tongue-tied incoherence in their presence.

Written during the Indian freedom movement, The Bachelors' Club also satirizes the impractical goals of the many self-appointed freedom organizations that made celibacy and monastic life prerequisites for social work: "the idea of a band of men, after renouncing the world, dressed appropriately, of cheerful countenance, going round the length and breadth of the country, and spreading our message through songs, through speeches ought to be beneficial". Settling down as a responsible householder, Tagore suggests, isn't so bad an idea, either. As in Shavian drama, he persuades us to laugh at the hypocrisies of the genteel middle classes, as well as those of so-called intellectuals. The impressive rhetoric of the debates that Shrish and Bipin engage in essentially lack conviction, and their scholarly discussions concern the common man, even as they display an astounding ignorance about the world they inhabit. The play aims to fulfil the Bergsonian moral role of using laughter as a means to create better human behaviour. While entertaining them, Tagore brings his audience to what Shaw might have called "the melting mood", to make them recognize and accept their follies.

In the introduction to the present edition of the play, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay points out that Tagore's inclusion of songs and poetry "creates a linguistic ambience advantageous to the art of mirth", and also that it can only be fully appreciated in the context of Tagore's literary output, and of the contemporary intellectual milieu in India. This new translation does justice to the spirit of the play, meanwhile, as Sukhendu Ray, aware of the limitations of translating one idiom into another, opts to remain faithful to the meaning rather than metrical strictures of Tagore's verses.

Besides being a rigorous social critic, Tagore was also one of the foremost Indian thinkers of his time. Religion and Rabindranath Tagore illustrates his profound involvement with contemporary leading philosophical ideas, especially those of the Brahmo Samaj (the Bengali Reformist movement founded by Raja Rammohun Roy). Tagore had inherited the legacy of the Brahmo Samaj from his father Maharshi Debendranath Tagore, the leader of the Adi Brahmo Samaj. The speeches and letters in this selection illustrate Rabindranath's thorough knowledge of the Hindu philosophical tradition, especially Advaitism (the principle of non-duality), which is based on
the Upanishads, and which was also largely the basis of the doctrine of Brahmo Samaj. "In the light of the Upanishads which he mastered," Tagore writes in "The Mystics of Medieval India", "Rammohun was able to perceive the Hindu, the Muslim, and the Christian in their true identities. His intelligence and magnanimity of heart enabled him to preach the unity of man in a country marked by acute social differentiation."

As with his fellow reformers, Tagore's spirituality is intrinsically connected to the nationalist movement, which aimed at bringing about social unity. In this regard, the non-duality principle of the Brahmo Samaj, of which Tagore was a staunch advocate, proved very useful, since it emphasized the equality of all human beings, refreshingly different from the divisive influences of caste and religious distinctions. The Brahmo Samaj, moreover, was a key organization that worked towards achieving social changes by helping to "eradicate many malpractices and superstition. In particular, it has helped bring education to Indian women, to generally improve their social status and to bring to them their natural rights as human beings".

Religion or Dharma for Tagore is as much about a way of life as it is about an organized community, and it is based on compassion, a sense of unity and a desire to better one's spiritual existence. In keeping with the beliefs of the Samaj, Tagore emphasizes a personal relation with the Almighty outside any kind of authoritative mediation: "I do not consider the guru to be a mediating symbol. All I know is that God directly manifests himself where man achieves true fulfilment . . .". In a letter to Kadambini Dutta of July 4, 1910, Tagore condemns image worship: "Gods that are conceived or crafted as images are strongly bound up in their personal histories: they are born and they die, they marry and beget children, and are visibly affected by feelings of anger and jealousy. Surely, we abuse our own intelligence when taking such histories to be credible".

In his introduction to this volume, Amiya P. Sen argues that Tagore's endeavour was "to further humanize God and bring out the spiritual potential in men": "Anthropocentrism and not anthropomorphism is perhaps a better description of the nature of this enterprise". Spirituality, for Tagore, is essentially the search for supreme truth. In this pursuit, he uses his vast learning without lapsing into pedantry, and explores the meaning of spirituality and his own existence rationally and relentlessly. In Atmaparichay (1917), an account of his search for self-identity, Tagore states: "I cannot, with any clarity or definitiveness, claim to comprehend what religion means to me. It is not something that is prescriptive, nor written down in the form of philosophical discourse. Once detached from everyday life, it is quite impossible for me to understand this religion". The realization of one's spirituality is not a condition but an ongoing process. The recognition of "Truth", according to Tagore, is an essentially aesthetic experience that can be achieved through the appreciation of nature, and even love. He argues that the saints of the Bhakti movement (a religious reform movement in medieval India, which also advocated an intimate relationship between God and His worshippers), such as Nanak, Kabir, Dadu and Gyandas, were also poets in their own right – their poetry stemming from their unique gift of perception. It was principally for the "poetic thought" of works such as the intensely spiritual Gitanjali (1910), of course, rather than the satirical Bachelors' Club, that Tagore received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.

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Choosing a tongue

Choosing a tongue

Dalit migrant, 1947

Book Details

Rosemary Marangoly George

INDIAN ENGLISH AND THE FICTION OF NATIONAL LITERATURE

285pp. Cambridge University Press. £60.
978 1 1070 4000 7

Language and identity vie for the right to India's national literature

NAVTEJ SARNA

The English language has always had an uneasy and complex relationship with the Indian state, being simultaneously the language of the colonizer as well as a bridge to the wider world. It is difficult to deny the advantages Indians have gained from knowing the language. In the early twentieth century, literacy in English served as a hallmark of upward mobility even as the struggle against British rule gathered strength. Given this contradiction, a certain amount of self-consciousness about English was natural. Gandhi began his first public political speech after his return from South Africa in 1914 with an apology for speaking in English; he yearned for a day when people would speak a language that would reach the "heart of a nation". ­During the freedom struggle, English, though spoken by a minority, effectively became the language of the elite, the language of power and that of the struggle itself. During the drafting of the Indian Constitution, the article on a national language was the most hotly debated; Hindi was finally selected to be the "official" (and not national) language of India with English to continue, for a further fifteen years at least, for those official purposes for which it had been used so far. The final version of the Constitution was first produced in English; yet English, despite its wide usage, does not appear in the twenty-two officially recognized languages listed in the eighth schedule of the Constitution.

Against this background, Rosemary Marangoly George examines intricate issues of language, literature, criticism and nationhood in her ambitiously argued Indian English and the Fiction of National Literature. George's point is that what came to be known as representative or "national" Indian literature was not an organic creation but a deliberately constructed edifice in the years leading up to independence and beyond, and that English played a major role in this exercise. She critically examines the work of Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan (who along with Raja Rao were the Indian writers best known abroad before Independence, mainly because they wrote in English). Narayan's vision of the caste-ordered but benevolent world of Malgudi that idealized a simple past based on "Indianness" and Anand's progressive, socialist championing of the downtrodden in a colonial setting were ready grist for a literary establishment, including the State-sponsored Sahitya Akademi (Academy of Letters) working to create a singular united national literature out of diverse linguistic and literary traditions. The result was a vision of an India with a past as well as a future, a nation deserving of and ready for freedom – and, once free, capable of claiming its place in world literature. In this endeavour, it was "Indianness", the commonality of spirit and a collective cultural inheritance that was to be celebrated; divisive themes and more immediate literary concerns were underplayed. Ironically, the language that could best take this message of the nation – without sounding parochial or regional – to international audiences, either in original or translation, was English.

This effort to build a national literature meant that much else of perhaps greater merit remained in the shadows, limited to vernacular audiences, simply because it did not fit into a uniting national vision or was not translated into English. This is the inheritance bequeathed to the postcolonial literary establishment in India: it is writing in English that occupies centre stage at the glitzy literary festivals, receives the huge advances, the generous reviews and awards, the sales; the rich literatures of Indian languages still finish a poor second, waiting for the translator's magic wand. What has faded is the preoccupation with portraying a united nation. Writers explore a greater breadth of themes now, including divisive ones; an uncharitable view would be that such themes make books easier to sell abroad as Indian exotica.

George examines Mulk Raj Anand's novel Untouchable, first published in 1935 and recently reprinted with a fluent introduction by Ramachandra Guha, to show how a national reading has subsumed an essentially social reading. Much like Raja Rao's Kanthapura and R. K. Narayan's Waiting for the Mahatma, Untouchable has been read predominantly as a "Mahatma" novel, essentially because of a cameo appearance by Mahatma Gandhi in the novel, Anand's uncorroborated claim – made as late as the mid-1960s – of Gandhi's direct influence on the draft during the author's stay at Sabarmati ashram, and Anand's assertion that his earlier novels were banned by the British. George argues that, contrary to this retrospective view, Untouchable concentrates on the social imperative of abolishing caste hierarchy rather than on anti-colonialism. In fact, it questions the Gandhian approach to untouchability.

A close reading of the novel would appear to bear this out in significant part. Confined Joyce-like to a single day, but written with a clunky realism, Untouchable follows Bakha, a young sweeper boy in the mould of a noble savage, through his day in a cantonment town. He is alternatively angry and submissive, his smouldering rage contained by the fatalism of generations, as he struggles with the dehumanizing burden of being a scavenger of human excrement, the ritually polluting profession of his forefathers. The day's events underline the deep discrimination that defines the caste system. There is the angry street brawl when Bakha accidentally brushes against a high-caste Hindu; the temple priest who accuses him of polluting the temple even as he makes lecherous advances towards the boy's sister; the low-castes waiting on the village well for a high-caste to draw water for them. Bakha yearns for change, for a life beyond the cleaning of latrines and hurling of abuse, even the life of the European sahibs – a life of "strange, low canvas beds covered tightly with blankets, eating eggs, drinking tea and wine in tea mugs, going to parade and then walking down to the bazaar with cigarettes in their mouths and small silver-mounted canes in their hands". He expresses his emancipation through random items of European dress that he picks up from the rag-sellers in the cantonment – a regulation overcoat, breeches, puttees and ammunition boots.

Anand offers Bakha several alternative ways out of the rigid caste hierarchy. There is the option of conversion to Christianity at the hands of Colonel Hutchinson, the local Salvation Army padre who scouts the outcaste colony to win over souls for Jesus with his caste-free sympathy – only a racist outburst from Hutchinson's working-class wife ruins the attempt. Bakha then joins a crowd of "all the different races, colours, castes and creeds" drawn to the magnetic, Messiah-like presence of the Mahatma. The political context is Gandhi's recent fast unto death to oppose separate electorates for the untouchables (or Dalits) which he regarded as another manifestation of British divide-and-rule policy, arguing that he represented all untouchables, or Harijans (people of God) as he called them. The Dalit leader, B. R. Ambedkar, a staunch Gandhi rival and the eventual Chairman of the Drafting Committee of India's Constitution, rejected this attitude of inclusivity without equality; he withdrew his demand for separate electorates only under pressure from Gandhi's fast.

Bakha reacts to Gandhi's remarks un­evenly: he is happy to hear that untouchability is a sin and a blot on Hinduism and that Gandhi wishes to be reborn as an outcaste. But he considers it unfair that the Mahatma believes that the untouchables must purify themselves, "rid themselves of evil habits, like drinking liquor and eating carrion", in order to achieve emancipation. The confusion anticipates the difference in approach of Gandhi and Ambedkar. The latter, whom Dalits in India today regard as their true emancipator, did not believe that the consciences of upper-caste Hindus could be aroused through persuasion and ­preferred a more drastic path. Decrying ­Gandhi's idealization of the village, he pushed instead for rapid urbanization and industrialization which would enable the untouchables to follow dignified professions. The most appealing solution that Anand offers Bakha at the end of the book is technology, when a modernizing poet points to the limitations of Gandhian thought and argues that the import of the flushing Western toilet may quickly end untouchability.

Untouchable accurately reflects central Dalit concerns of the time: the daily humiliation, demands for education and temple entry, access to public wells, sexual vulnerability of Dalit women. Yet Bakha is too much of an individualist, only incidentally worried about his community's concerns, and Anand is ultimately an upper-caste outsider with an angry edge and sympathetic eye. More authentic Dalit voices have long since eclipsed the novel in their expression of caste discrimination. Thus while Untouchable may not convincingly be a Mahatma novel, neither is it Dalit literature. But neat labels sit uncomfortably on great works of passion and art: Untouchable remains relevant in a country where, as Guha says ,"untouchability has been challenged, but by no means ended" and whose new Prime Minister in his Independence Day speech from the Red Fort in Delhi called for a national drive to build toilets.

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Monuments to Liberty

Monuments to Liberty



Did Thomas Paine write the whole of Rights of Man, and if not, what does that mean for our understanding of the French Revolution?

JONATHAN CLARK

Here is a familiar outline account of the French Revolution, long established and echoed in various forms in many textbooks. The Revolution's antecedents can be traced to Louis XIV. He was a despot: by show and ostentation, he lured the French into an attitude of subordination and political passivity. Only among subsequent philosophers was a spirit of liberty preserved. Montesquieu gave that spirit veiled expression. Voltaire dared to write open satire against statecraft as well as priestcraft; he deserves the thanks of mankind, whatever his personal motives. Rousseau and Raynal expressed high ideals of liberty. Quesnay and Turgot showed that the administration of government could be reformed. Together, they spread throughout their country a spirit of political inquiry, and prepared the way for the reception in France of the example of the American Revolution.

The French troops who served in America during the revolutionary war learned lessons about the practice and principle of liberty. News of the American Revolution, circulating in France, proclaimed the rights of man and justified resistance to oppression. Little of America's impact was owed to France's chief minister, Vergennes, who was by his nature a despot, but something was owed to Franklin, America's minister at the French court, and something also to Lafayette, the French soldier serving in America, who was familiar with colonial leaders and their civil government. After the peace in 1783, returning French soldiers and officers carried the spirit of liberty back to France.

There, Louis XVI's minister Calonne had by his profligacy destabilized French national finances; theparlements resisted the imposition of new taxes, and their resistance evoked national support behind those ancient institutions. Thus opened a period of political manoeuvre in which the ministers attempted to secure backing from other bodies, and so to circumvent the troublesome parlements. These political intrigues, at court and in the newly summoned Assembly of the Notables, turned out badly for Calonne, who was dismissed after Lafayette's charge that he was guilty of corruption. Lafayette also sought to close the Bastille and abolish lettres de cachet, which effected arbitrary arrest, but a majority of the nobles in the Assembly still supported both. Conflict over the national finances continued. Lafayette countered a ministerial attempt to make the Assembly a tax-granting body; when the new prime minister, the Archbishop of Toulouse, forced the registration of additional taxes at a royal lit de justice, the Paris parlement resisted, and the King was induced to promise the recall of the Estates-General.

Louis's ministers tried to frustrate that recall by establishing a new constitutional body, the Cour plénière, but this initiative was checked, the Archbishop fell, Necker was restored as minister, and the Estates-General assembled for the first time since 1614. Its recall only opened up endless political conflict over its composition and procedure. Finally the Third Estate claimed the authority of the nation and renamed itself the National Assembly; the First and Second Estates then joined the Third in this single chamber, by implication possessing sovereignty.

Certain malcontents from the clergy and aristocracy sought to prevent this amalgamation of chambers, but they provoked a widespread national anti-aristocratic reaction. Led by the Comte d'Artois, the King's brother, these malcontents now tried to close the National Assembly, whose members reconvened in a nearby tennis court and showed their resolve to defend their new institution. The plot for a military coup was pressed forward, but the scheme was foiled. The ministers ignored Lafayette's three attempts to send deputations from the National Assembly, over which he now presided, to confer with the King, until the moment when the ministers' position suddenly disintegrated. They now fled, the Bastille fell, and the troops that had been converging on Versailles dispersed. Counter-revolution was frustrated. Without seeking retribution, the National Assembly set about forming a constitution founded on the rights of man and the authority of the people.

This is an agreeably familiar story; so deeply absorbed, indeed, that its status as just one possible interpretation of complex and chronologically extended events has been largely forgotten. Historians labour to refine or diversify this version, but most of them now once more sympathize with its essentials. With the decline of the Marxist model of the French Revolution in recent decades, interpretative fashions have drifted back to this older reliance on the Enlightenment and natural rights, and on the teleology that saw these discourses slowly growing since the late seventeenth century, spread by prophets and pioneers, but eventually triumphant in 1776 and 1789.

Beyond the ranks of professional historians, the wider public is subliminally convinced that that was, broadly speaking, how things were. This deep conviction can be explained, for the story as set out above is only an abridgement of the account that first appeared in Thomas Paine's phenomenally successful Rights of Man (1791). About 6,000 words in length, it forms the central historical passage in that work. It is located in its pages just before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, a famous document which therefore appears to vindicate the preceding narrative. Few of the component parts of this story were wholly new, but in Rights of Man they were memorably drawn together and given classic expression. To English-speaking observers it seemed that the story must in its essentials be true, since Paine was there to observe events, and since Paine, as England's greatest revolutionary, naturally had a unique insight into the nature and causes of what is conventionally termed the "Age of Revolutions".

Rights of Man certainly achieved canonical status. Published in that remarkable work, this model has powerfully shaped the understandings of the French Revolution held by anglophone readers from 1791 to the present. They (and I) came to take it for granted, and so we failed to notice the problem. This 6,000-word narrative is eloquent, idealistic and visionary. There is, indeed, only one difficulty: Paine cannot have written it. He wrote it out; some of it he put into his own words; but he cannot have been the primary author. If so, this model cannot rest on his authority. Indeed, its status as merely one possible interpretation comes again into focus.

Paine was undoubtedly the author of the remainder of Rights of Man, and its readers have naturally looked to that work for an explanation of the French Revolution. But the adulation or blame heaped on Paine's book by its supporters or opponents has occluded the strangeness of this 6,000-word passage. It is, to begin with, different in tone from the rest of the work. The prose is unlike Paine's, although he evidently contributed some phrases (the joke that "nobility" was just a synonym for "no-ability" is one he may have remembered reading in the local newspaper when he was an exciseman in Lewes, Sussex). He may have been responsible for the report of the Comte d'Artois's visit to the Parlement of Paris on August 17, 1787 – "I was then standing in one of the apartments through which he had to pass, and could not help reflecting how wretched was the condition of a disrespected man" – though this is not certain.

Elsewhere, Rights of Man displays Paine's typically prominent authorial voice; by contrast, this narrative is mostly written in a mandarin third person. Paine was a master of the direct and the specific; this narrative is often couched in uplifting generalizations. Examined more closely, its prose seems not to be that of an Englishman at all; it reads like the English prose of a native French speaker. A research team at Iona College, New York, is engaged on a computer analysis of Paine's known prose against the prose of certain anonymous works conventionally ascribed to him, and we await the publication of their results. Meanwhile, caution is appropriate. The ascription of authorship on the basis of prose style alone is notoriously treacherous. Paine's style was highly distinctive; even so, a subjective judgement that this narrative passage was not primarily by Paine would be inconclusive if the argument were not supported by evidence. I contend that it is so supported.

First, what of the content of this narrative? It, too, is unlike anything else in Paine's writings. Elsewhere, he showed no significant knowledge of French history, although he was well informed about English history since the Revolution of 1688. Paine did not elsewhere discuss the Frenchphilosophes in any depth, or credit them with a key role in preparing the ground for revolution. He did not analyse the French parlements, or compare them with the Westminster Parliament and the colonial American assemblies. Immediately after the Peace of 1783, Paine did not elsewhere assert any great lesson brought back to Europe by the returning French troops.

More telling again, he did not elsewhere reveal knowledge of French high politics after the fall of Necker in 1781. For Paine, politics was merely "jockeyship", not the difficult and respectable art of getting important things done. The author of this narrative boasted of knowing "a sort of secret history" of the way the First and Second Estates in the Estates-General merged into the Third: Paine made no such boast of privileged access about any other French political episode. In other places he wrote nothing of the Assembly of the Notables, or the Cour plénière, or the complex political manoeuvres that surrounded such bodies. He would not have understood exchanges of conversation like that between the Comte d'Artois and Lafayette, printed in this narrative, for Paine did not speak French. In any case, his humble social standing meant that he could not have moved in court circles.

Rights of Man did indeed cite one French source for the history of the Estates-General, L'Intrigue du Cabinet. This was evidently Louis-Pierre Anquetil, L'intrigue du cabinet sous Henri IV et Louis XIII terminée par la Fronde (four volumes, Paris: Moutard, 1780). But since he was not a French speaker, Paine was unlikely to have found his way to this text himself, or understood it if he had found it. In general, this narrative gave an insider's view, and Paine, while in France, was never an insider. Even had he been a member of the social elite, he was out of France for most of the time covered by this passage, for he was in America from November 1774 and (except for one brief visit) returned to France for an extended period only in May 1787.

Who, then, can have written this 6,000-word narrative? I suggest that its author was probably Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), and that it embodies not neutral history but his very personal perspective on events. What evidence supports this ascription? The author would have needed to know much about France: to have formed views on the significance of Louis XIV's monarchy, on the general impact of the writings of a series of philosophes, on French public opinion, on the possible relation of the American war to France, on the history of the parlements, and on the detail of French high politics from 1783 to 1789. The author may also have had a grudge against Vergennes and Calonne, and a strong admiration of the Marquis de Lafayette, since the hero of this narrative is none other than Lafayette himself, whose role it consistently overstates. (Lafayette was not exactly "chosen to preside" over the National Assembly: he was only elected to fill the chair during late night sittings, which would have been beyond the strength of the elderly Archbishop of Vienne, and there is no record that Lafayette did this on more than a few such occasions.)

Especially, Lafayette's lifetime's achievement was in America, and this episode the narrative foregrounds. "The peculiar situation of the then Marquis de la Fayette is another link in the great chain", declared Rights of Man. "He served in America as an American officer under a commission of Congress, and by the universality of his acquaintance, was in close friendship with the civil government of America, as well as with the military line. He spoke the language of the country, entered into the discussions on the principles of government, and was always a welcome friend at any election." Arguably, this passage was expressed in the third person in order to conceal the vanity of its author. The overstatement continued. Thanks to his experience in America, Lafayette "was better acquainted with the science of civil government than the generality of the members who composed the Assembly of the Notables could then be"; consequently, "the brunt of the business" in that Assembly "fell considerably to his share". These were hardly modest estimates.

Earlier in Rights of Man, Paine acknowledged that Lafayette had provided him with the text of "some proposals for a declaration of rights" made "to the National Assembly, on the 11th of July, 1789" and Paine offered a reason for his friend's bringing it forward then ("M. de la Fayette has since informed me"). Rights of Man heaped praise on the Frenchman's role in the American Revolution: "His conduct through the whole of that enterprise is one of the most extraordinary that is to be found in the history of a young man, scarcely then twenty years of age". Paine recounted Lafayette's farewell address to Congress, which he is unlikely to have witnessed. So we know from elsewhere in Rights of Man that Lafayette provided Paine with information, and at least one document.

It has also escaped notice that the organization of Paine's famous book is, in part, repetitive. For this 6,000-word passage was not the only narrative about France in Rights of Man: there were two others, which preceded it. Indeed, the third and longer one oddly went over again the ground covered in the previous two: this suggests that the third passage may have been an interpolation, inserted by Paine when it came to hand. The first narrative, of about 2,250 words, concerned the fall of the Bastille on July 14 , 1789; the second, slightly shorter, covered the "October Days" of October 5–6 that year, when the Paris mob, or an organized part of it, marched to Versailles and compelled the royal family to return under escort to the capital, where they were henceforth effectively prisoners.

Paine's first narrative began with the evocative introduction: "The mind can hardly picture to itself a more tremendous scene than what the city of Paris exhibited at the time of taking the Bastille". Such expressions seem to give his account the authority of an eyewitness. In reality, Paine was in England at the time, and must have relied on others for his information.

Next, Paine turned to the October Days, challenging the accuracy of Edmund Burke's account of that episode. Again, Paine did not reveal that he had been in England at the time. His hero in the march to Versailles and the return to Paris was again Lafayette, who, according to Paine, restrained the Paris mob. "By an amiable and spirited manner of address, he had hitherto been fortunate in calming disquietudes, and in this he was extraordinarily successful." By his communications, sent by express, Lafayette had persuaded the King not to withdraw to Metz, but to remain at Versailles and so preserve the possibility of a compromise. Paine added a footnote: "I am warranted in asserting this, as I had it personally from M. de la Fayette, with whom I have lived in habits of friendship for fourteen years". At Versailles, "M. de la Fayette became the mediator between the enraged parties". The next day "M. de la Fayette had a second time to interpose between the parties". Thanks to Lafayette, the march to Versailles had a "peaceful termination".

Towards the start of Rights of Man, Paine had dramatized his idealistic rejection of Burke by quoting Lafayette's farewell speech to the American Congress. After the 6,000- word passage discussed here, in his "Observations" on the text of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, Paine applied Lafayette's speech to this subsequent French episode: "Having now traced the progress of the French Revolution through most of its principal stages, from its commencement to the taking of the Bastille, and its establishment by the Declaration of Rights, I will close the subject with the energetic apostrophe of M. de la Fayette – May this great monument raised to Liberty, serve as a lesson to the oppressor, and an example to the oppressed!" To this eulogy Paine added a footnote: "N.B. Since the taking the Bastille, the occurrences have been published: but the matters recorded in this narrative, are prior to that period; and some of them, as may easily be seen, can be but very little known". Other accounts of the taking of the Bastille had indeed appeared in print in England; but Paine wished to distance his own account from them. It seems he thought he had access to more reliable information.

Back in England, Paine set about writing Rights of Man, Part the Second, published in London in February 1792. It was dedicated to Lafayette. Returning to Paris in September that year, Paine at first stayed with his French friend. Indeed at that time he knew no Frenchman better than he knew Lafayette. And the strongest piece of evidence that Lafayette had supplied Paine with the substance of the 6,000-word narrative, as well as other information, came from Lafayette's own hand, for on January 12, 1790 he had written to George Washington: "Common Sense [Paine] is writing a Book for you – there you will See a part of My Adventures – I Hope they will turn to the Advantage of My Country and Mankind in General". The evidence, then, is cumulative, and Lafayette's letter importantly supports this contextual reinterpretation.

What, if this hypothesis is correct, were Lafayette's motives? He was an ambitious player in French Revolutionary politics, seeking to advance his own career and his own vision. This career soon ended disastrously when the Terror, spiralling out of control, threatened his own life, and he fled, surrendering to Austrian troops in August 1792. In France, Lafayette's name was henceforth widely disparaged. But at the outbreak of the Revolution, he had had bright prospects. What better way of propagating his version of events, with himself at their centre, than feeding his interpretation to his English friend, a brilliant journalist but one who knew little of France and would have been unable to check Lafayette's story? And it was a tribute to Paine's talent as a journalist that he could assimilate such information and use it to such effect.

It seems, then, that this passage is very probably not a history primarily written by Paine but in origin Lafayette's self-serving publicity, part of his attempt to become the George Washington of the French Revolution. If so, Paine seemingly accepted uncritically the account of his patron.

Indeed Paine was not a historian, and his status in some quarters as the key anglophone interpreter of his age calls for careful analysis; his achievements were different. He never wrote a full history of the French Revolution, or of the American. The confident historical claim of this de-attributed narrative that the American Revolution inspired the French needs to be treated with caution. Certainly, returning troops had some role in France. But there were few officers who took very prominent parts in French politics, apart, of course, from Lafayette himself.

If Rights of Man is not primarily Paine's reliable historical insight into the nature and causes of the French Revolution, what is the book's intellectual foundation? The title reasonably leads us to expect a work on natural rights theory, but that is not quite what we get. True, rights are everywhere in Paine's text, repeatedly invoked yet hardly unpacked other than to say that man has rights because God gives them to each individual at the moment of that individual's creation.

We must, then, re-examine the historical interpretation, dependent not least on Rights of Man, that the French Revolution was essentially a long-anticipated protest against natural rights denied and the instantiation of natural rights in a society that rights now transformed. If so, "rights" in Rights of Man begin to look somewhat different. No longer do they seem the intellectual core of the book. Increasingly, they look like truisms, the self-evident terms of a discourse that had broadened out to the point where their practical relevance was seriously diluted.

Indeed, Paine's English understanding of natural rights as divine gifts was different from the secular understandings that were evidently predominant in Paris. If so, in what sense were natural rights discourse and Enlightenment discourse, as echoed by Paine, really the keys to the "Age of Revolutions"? If Lafayette was indeed the primary author of this central passage of Rights of Man, the consequences for our general assumptions about this foundational episode are considerable, and Paine's undoubtedly important writings deserve a closer and less hagiographic reading than they sometimes receive. Historians have much re-thinking to do.

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