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Chris Bertram
I discovered recently that my late Aunt Mary, who was in her time PA to the Postmaster General and a crack typist, had transcribed a letter from a distant relative of ours recounting a journey in 1865 from London to Aden (part of a journey to India). The letter seems sufficiently interesting to post here at Crooked Timber. Among the points of interest are the speed of the journey to Marseilles (remember, we are only 35 years into the railway era), seeing de Lesseps in Egypt — who has constructed the “Sweet Water Canal” (the Ismaïlia Canal) and has yet to complete the Suez Canal), impressions of the various places he passed through, and the tragic funeral of a young man who has died of drink. But much else besides. I’ve digitized by using the OCR on my phone and have checked the various oddities and spellings, so this should be an accurate reproduction.
S.S. Mooltan, Red Sea
22 December 1865
My dear Nelly,
I promised Mamma that I would send you all a letter but the old “Ripon” made such bad weather of it that although an old sailor I could not write very comfortably on board her and therefore all the writing that I did on board was either on business or to your dear Mother. We are now in a very fine large ship and as the weather is fine the sea very smooth and I have a cabin to myself, I can write in comfort and without being disturbed. You will I am sure like to have a kind of log or journal of my proceeding since I left you all on Monday and I will try and recollect the places that I have passed through and any little incidents that may be interesting and jot them down on paper to post at Aden, and although addressed to your dear Nelly you must understand that this letter is meant for all my dear children, and as I shall probably not write to your Mother from Aden, why, this will suffice to let her know also that I am in health and as happy as I can be while away from all I love.
I’ve been reading more in French this year. In fact, my last four novels have been in French, which I’m kind-of retrospectively surprised about. Naturally, they come in various degrees of difficulty for someone whose conversational French is good but not perfect. Happily, a good deal of mine was picked up in argot-laden Parisian interactions in the 1970s, and that has definitely helped with some of my more recent choices, and particularly with Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), which is widely thought of as one of the great 20th-century novels in the language, but it little-known in the anglophone world, perhaps because neither of its clunky English translations is available from a mass-market house like Penguin. I wonder also whether Céline’s deplorable personal history (anti-semitism, Nazi collaboration etc) don’t make the prospect of reading him unappealing to an anglophone audience. (Oliver Kamm once wrote to insist on the importance of his enduring cancellation.)
Voyage is a pretty strange book, with an extraordinarily implausible plot, which nevetheless redeems itself through the the penetration of its grimly misanthropic vision, its rush of quotable aphorisms, and its striking conversational language and idiosyncratic vocabulary. We follow the central character, Bardamu, through a quick sequence of different episodes from the First World War, to colonial Africa, to New York and then the Ford Motor Company in Detroit before the novel settles down to a slower-paced telling of the story of the impoverished doctor in the suburbs of Paris he becomes and the murder plot he becomes entwined with. He’s a miserable selfish character, but knows himself to be one, so acts without self-regard while pitilessly dissecting the egoism and brutality of those around him and concluding that pleasure alone can make life bearable in the time before sickness and death. In all of this, he intersects with the mysterious Robinson, whom he first meets in the First World War, then again in Africa, in Detroit and back in the suburbs. The book contains many episodes of stunning description and psychological insight. To name but two, on the Western Front Bardamu is sent on a reconnaisance mission to see if a small town has been occupied by the Germans. The eerie description of him leading a clip-clopping horse through the deserted streets, accompanied by a deserter (Robinson) he has met, would, just on its own, give the book a place in literature. Much later, out on a boating trip with Robinson and his fiancée Madelon, he is invited to a birthday party on a barge and feels acute discomfort and resentment at being treated with generosity by people he knows to be better than he is: his self-hatred feeds his dislike of those who are kind to him. Céline evocation of this sense of resentful underservingness is wonderfully done.
Definitely worth your time, even if Céline was a horrible character, and a book worthy of revived attention. Why don’t Penguin or Oxford World Classics issue a new translation? I’m planning to read Mort à credit over Christmas.
In any society, certain needs have to be catered for, either socially or privately. At a minumum, those unable to work, because they are too young, too old, or too sick have to be cared for. Of course, they can be cared for in ways that are better or worse for them, but caring there must be, and that is going to take someone’s time, labour, and money.
I’ve been thinking about these rather obvious facts over the past few days partly because a report came out showing how many people – mainly women – are being driven out of the the UK workforce by the need to care for relatives, given that the social care system is broken. At present, there are also a lot of people out of the UK labour market either because they can’t work due to COVID and its after-effects, or because the underfunded National Health Service has been shattered by the pandemic and they can’t get the treatment they need in a timely fashion for other health problems they have. If left languishing, the skills these people have will atrophy. Many of them will never work again.
At the same time, our soon-to-be-former Prime Minister has been pushing her “pro-growth” agenda, which largely consisted of tax cuts, and her now-former Home Secretary mocked the anti-growth coalition of “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating, wokerati”, of which I am proud to consider myself a member.
Their central assumption is that growth is best served by a low-tax economy and that public spending needs radical reduction, with the fat-cutting exercise of the last twelve years now to be extended to the bones. Well, I hope readers can see the problem. You don’t get growth by pursuing policies that effectively force people to give up productive work either through their own sickness, or in order to care for other people. If these needs are not met socially, they will be met privately, and, again, because it bears repeating, in ways that are disproportionately damaging to women.
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We’ve been blogging together at Crooked Timber for nineteen years now, pre-Facebook even. Inevitably people move on to new projects in that time or just find less interest in writing in this format. So from time to time the tree surgeon has to visit and do some running repairs on our crooked timber. We’re really happy to welcome some new bloggers to the party with a couple more probably on the way in a few months. Our new additions are Chris Armstrong, Speranta Dumitru, Kevin Munger, Paul Segal and Eric Schliesser and, if all goes according to plan, there will be a couple of further additions in December that will also improve the gender balance of our new cohort. Also a sad farewell to Daniel Davies, Kieran Healy, Scott McLemee, Eric Rauchway, Corey Robin, Astra Taylor, and Rich Yeselson who have contributed so much over the years, particularly to Dan and Kieran who were founding members back in 2003, with Kieran’s tech support having dug us out of more internet holes than I can remember.
A little bit about all of the new bloggers below:
Last weekend we had a “historical reconstruction” in Pézenas as part of the 400th centenary celebration of Molière’s birth. There were parades and performances and much dressing up. There were nobles, and there were peasants….
