Regeneration by Pat Barker

I first read this book about two years ago, around the time when the British Ministry of Defence was seeking pardons for 300 British soldiers who were shot for military offences, including cowardice and desertion, during World War I. This particular book was a recommendation from a friend who suggested it after I posted a review of Siegfried Sassoon’s collected poems. I am very, very hard to satisfy when it comes to historical fiction…which is why it makes me quite glad to say that I will suggest this book to anyone with even a smidgen of interest in a fictional perspective on actual historical events.

Regeneration by Pat Barker

In 1917, decorated war hero and published poet Siegfried Sassoon sent a letter to his commanding officer, denouncing the war. The letter caused a sensation at the time, as Sassoon’s words were reprinted in the press and even read out in Parliament. As a result of his protest — and to allow his superiors to avoid the high-profile court-martial that would have certainly happened otherwise — Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh to be treated for shell-shock. Pat Barker’s story picks up there, for Regeneration focuses on Sassoon’s time at the hospital and his treatment by the psychologist W. H. R. Rivers. But while Sassoon’s story forms the framework of the novel, Regeneration explores several of the issues that burned the memory of the Great War into the minds of an entire generation: how men coped (or could not cope) with the horrific sights they had seen in the trenches, how the war changed lives and altered priorities, and how the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder as we know it today was only just beginning to be understood by those who suffered from it and those who treated it.

There are many kinds of sickness — physical, mental, and emotional — in Regeneration. Setting the story in what is essentially a mental hospital allows Barker to show several sides of the war that is not often considered, especially in the context of the time period. Early psychiatric treatments for shell-shock, as it was known then, were primitive at best and downright cruel at worst, and many of the therapies and treatments that are now considered standard practice for PTSD sufferers were considered radical and even nonsensical by the medical standards of the day. The theme of emasculation (by mental illness or through actual physical injury) haunts the minds of the male characters. Concerns over homosexuality and effeminate behaviour crop up constantly throughout the book, nearly always tied into the idea of the manly valour of warfare and the repression of one’s emotions during wartime. (Sassoon was known to be part of a literary circle that included Oscar Wilde’s close friend Robbie Ross, and the friendship formed at Craiglockhart between Sassoon and poet Wilfred Owen is thought by some scholars to have had an effect on the homoerotic elements that were to appear in Owen’s published work.) Barker does an excellent job of letting the characters speak for themselves, as they develop the most important themes almost of their own accord.

Regeneration is the first part of a three-part series, continued in The Eye in the Door and Ghost Road. Of the three, Regeneration is the book set most firmly in historical events; according to other reviews I have read, the other two books continue the story in the same context and time period but do not cleave so closely to factual occurrences. Regeneration leaves off as an Army medical board clears Sassoon to return to the front, but that ending by no means wraps up the entire story that Barker begins to tell. And even though I have not yet had a chance to look into the rest of the triology, the overarching story seemed well-told and interesting enough to make it worth seeing through until the end.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

I wrote this review quite a while ago, and wasn’t entirely satisfied with the organisational structure of my first attempt. I think I like this version a bit better — it seems slightly clearer than my initial review — but I may end up revisiting it later on to make a few more tweaks to it.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

German political economist Max Weber wrote extensively on what sociologists today would consider the ‘sociology of religion’, specifically regarding the effects of religious beliefs on social structures and the economic activities that developed in different societies. His best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, coined the phrase ‘Protestant work ethic’ to represent one particular connection he noticed between religion and economics and its effect on the historical development and evolution of capitalism.

Simply put, Weber suggests that some Protestant denominations, specifically those of the Calvinist or ‘Puritan’ school of thought, came to view economic success as an outward sign of an individual’s chances of salvation. Those who worked hard, saved much, spent little, and prospered financially seemed to be marked (to mortal eyes) as God’s chosen, and their example fed back into the religious teachings of their communities and continued the same interconnected cycle of religion and economics. These teachings, Weber theorises, contributed to the growth and development of capitalism in the economies of European countries like the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as in the American colonies — specifically, those of New England and the mid-Atlantic regions — where the more Puritan types of Protestant settlers made their homes. Weber also suggests that the religious basis of this school of thought and action gradually faded and blurred over time (as in Benjamin Franklin’s sayings, which emphasise thrift and hard work with less overt emphasis on the spiritual reasons for these practices), leaving behind only the more secular side of the drive towards personal financial prosperity.

Nonetheless, Weber takes care to state that this ethic was not the only factor in the development of the new economic order, nor still was it the most important factor. But he views the Reformation and the Protestant religion as one very specific influence on the modern system of political economics. As both a work of economic history (from one of the last political economists to emerge from the traditions of the German Historical School of economics) and a work on the sociology of religion (from one of the founders of this particular discipline), it is hardly surprisingly that historians, economists, sociologists, and religion students have all been able to find something of value in The Protestant Ethic over the year.

The edition I read was Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic, which I found to be a very good English-language edition. At times, I almost appreciated his clear and concise footnotes (and the explanations they provided) more than the actual text of the book. My edition also has a superb introduction by Anthony Giddens, which goes into very interesting detail about the writing process that went into the creation of The Protestant Ethic and its relation to Weber’s other works on the sociology of religion. Since the notion of a ‘Protestant work-ethic’ has long since passed into common parlance, to the point where most people who use it would have a difficult time explaining what they actually mean by it, it’s certainly interesting to look at the work that coined the phrase and see precisely what the author originally intended by the concept.

On the Pleasure of Hating by William Hazlitt

I was very pleased with the edition of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations that was published in Penguin’s Great Ideas Series, and when I came across another display a little while ago I thought that I would pick up another volume — this time, by an author I had never read before.

On the Pleasure of Hating by William Hazlitt (Penguin Great Ideas Series)

Radical English essayist William Hazlitt penned the bulk of his work in the late Georgian and early Regency periods, and though he began as a dabbling painter and occasional writer he turned his hand to journalism and literary criticism, writing for publications such as the Times and the Edinburgh Review. As an essayist, he was greatly influenced by the philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment as well as Edmund Burke, though his admiration for the latter waned somewhat as a result of some of Burke’s more conservative writings. But he wrote on a number of different subjects, and the essays in this little edition touch on such diverse topics as the joys of going to a boxing match in the country, the parasitical nature of the English moneyed classes, the fallacy of the divine right of kings…and, naturally, the title essay, which challenges the reader to regard hatred as one of the few real constants (and indeed, pleasures) in human life.

Hazlitt’s essays are written in a style that has long been out of fashion — and not, I think, entirely without reason. They seem as if they were meant to be read aloud, to a group, in a particularly bombastic tone of voice. His tone is definitely combative, almost arrogantly defensive, and he seems to aim at (and enjoy) working his readers into a frenzy of either vehemently agreeing or soundly disagreeing with him. If Hazlitt was paid by the word for what he wrote, he would likely have made a fair amount of money even for his less enthusiastic essays. Yet even though his writings likely will not hold everyone’s attention, as an essayist who is representative of a particular writing style and a specific period of literary history, his works have a definite place in the Penguin Great Ideas series.

Commentary: New Labour, Bad Writing

John Lanchester’s London Review of Books assessment of the recently published memoirs of Cherie Blair, John Prescott, and Tim Levy ties in rather neatly to a post I made a few months ago about the unsettling similarities between John Prescott and George Brown.

I’ve been looking into the history of political memoirs, focusing at the moment on the National Archives files regarding the legal squabblings that surrounded the publication of Richard Crossman’s diaries in the mid-1970s. Crossman claimed, before he died, that the purpose of publishing his memoirs was to expose the secretive inner workings of government and give the reading public a more realistic view of the everyday life of a Cabinet Minister. (This he certainly did, in what Cabinet Secretary Sir John Hunt shudderingly called a ‘blow-by-blow account’ of everything from dissention during Cabinet meetings to rows within Crossman’s private office.) Crossman almost assuredly sought to one-up Harold Wilson, whose The Labour Government, 1964-1970: A Personal Record was rushed to press in 1971 in hopes of earning its author a bit more money to support the lifestyle (i.e., the political staff) to which he had become accustomed as Prime Minister. But when Crossman was diagnosed with cancer, the publication of his diaries became a good deal more pressing a concern to him — and after his death, his executors (including Michael Foot) took up the call to ‘respect his final wishes’ and see the diaries into print.

I’m still pondering various opinions about whether the publication of the Crossman diaries has done more good than harm, but there’s one thing that certainly sets Crossman apart from most of his literary successors. With the possible exception of Alan Clark (who published one volume of diaries during his life and provided enough material for two more volumes after his death), most of the flood of political diaries and memoirs that have come on the market since the 1970s are by authors who are still alive; some are even still in office, or not very long out of it. The incentives to rush out a self-justifying memoir are even greater now that so many of them are on the market, if only to get the jump on any other colleagues (or enemies) who might have a book of their own ready to go. But I’d imagine that there’s something oddly unsatisfying about attempting to respond to posthumous diary or memoir, like Crossman’s. It’s too final, somehow — like getting into an argument over the telephone and then having the person at the other end suddenly hang up on you when you’re in mid-sentence. To paraphrase a comment supposedly made by a disgruntled Harold Wilson during a Cabinet meeting in the middle of the Crossman affair, ‘If any of you are looking to publish a diary, too, for God’s sake don’t die first. We need a chance to reply.’

Lanchester suggests that the memoirs in his review are as much as exercise in self-definition as they are in self-justification:

Since [the electorate] so manifestly aren’t grateful, or understanding, they feel a strong need to tell their version of their own story, to restore the complexity and inwardness to the public version of selves which, very often, exist purely as caricature.

Considering the content and tone of many of the memoirs that have been published since Crossman opened the doors, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts by Simon Jenkins

Another book that I found a bit tricky to review in full. I think I’ve managed to summarise most of what I wanted to say, but I’d be happy to elaborate in comments if there’s something it seems I’ve left out.

Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts by Simon Jenkins

The coming year will mark the 30th anniversary of the 1979 General Election, called after Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government lost a vote of no-confidence — by one vote — on 28 March 1979. That election brought the Conservative Party back into power for the first time since 1974, and brought Margaret Thatcher into office as Britain’s first female prime minister. So much has changed since 1979 that it’s often difficult to pinpoint where and when those changes took place, which makes it equally difficult to fully study how those changes have shaped how we look at recent history. Political journalist Simon Jenkins (formerly of the Economist and the Times, now a Guardian columnist) has taken it upon himself to delve into this recent history and thoroughly examine Thatcherism, its theory and practice, and the permutations it has gone through in the years since the Lady was unceremoniously ousted from power in 1990.

In Thatcher and Sons, Jenkins identifies not just one, but two Thatcher ‘revolutions’: the first involving an ideological shift from the ‘commanding heights’ of a mostly socialist economy to wholesale privatisation, and the second involving a massive push to centralise the government’s control over more and more aspects of British life. As he looks into these revolutions, Jenkins traces the line from Thatcher through John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown, showing how Thatcher’s ‘sons’ have embraced (in varying ways, and with varying degrees of eagerness) the murky ideological underpinnings of Thatcherism. He also shows how Thatcherism has permeated the structure of Whitehall, especially in terms of the power that has built up in the Treasury in the past three decades. But most of all, he attempts to describe how the seemingly contradictory aims of privatisation and centralisation came together to drive the revolutions forward, in a manner that eventually made it difficult for their proponents to control.

At its strongest, Jenkins’ prose is clear and sharp and almost damning in its thoroughness, particularly in his overview of Tony Blair’s rise to power in the various Labour Party upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s. (For those who were too young to remember the specifics as it happened, or paid very little attention to Labour’s persistent navel-gazing in Foot-Kinnock-Smith years, the book is worth reading for this section alone.) He does his best to examine and weigh the merits of many commonly held beliefs about Thatcher and her successors, but there are times when his analysis misses the mark. To take one example, he criticises Thatcher’s insistence that she owed very little loyalty to the Tory establishment because, in her words, ‘They had fought me unscrupulously all the way‘. Jenkins hints, quite openly, that this attitude smacks of ingratitude. After all, didn’t she owe many of her rapid advances in the party to her position as that rare and wonderous bird, the female Tory MP? There’s more than a touch of chauvinism in that approach, as Thatcher herself might be first to claim. She was all too aware of the fact that her sex was both her greatest weapon and her greatest weakness, and it is hardly surprising that she should have felt insulted that her advance in the party often had less to do with her political or intellectual merits and more to do with the need to have some sort of token woman on the front bench. And with so much attention paid to the similarities between Thatcher and her ‘sons’, especially Thatcher and Blair, it seems odd that Jenkins should have trouble explaining some of their differences in opinion over points like European integration.

Jenkins concludes his book by declaring that the only possible means of countering the worst excesses of the Thatcher revolutions is to encourage a third revolution to strike back at Thatcherite overcentralisation: ‘localism’, by which he means a devolution of power and responsibility from Whitehall to strengthen the local government institutions that were either weakened or abolished by the Thatcher revolutions. Jenkins heaps praise on the strength of local government as it appears in the United States, particularly the town-hall meetings held in the New England states, as well as on the strength of local civic life in France and the Scandinavian countries. Yet there is something about this third revolution that fails to sound convincing, perhaps because it veers too close to an outright political manifesto at times. As the lessons of Thatcher and Sons indicate all too well, one more all-encompassing solution that is guaranteed to fix Britain’s economic and social ills might not be what the public wants or the country needs. As this kind of manifesto, the book falls rather short — but as a work of very recent political history, it is a useful point of reference.

ADMIN: Publications Page Now Available

A short administration post, just to mention that I’m in the process of compiling a list of publications as a separate page on To Bed With a Trollope. I’ve marked ones that are forthcoming and provided appropriate links to those already in print — some of which may require separate subscription access, particularly for journal articles and the like.

More book reviews will be coming this weekend and next week!

Publications: Book Launch Reception

I’ll be in the Washington, DC, area on Tuesday, 15 July, attending the book launch reception for the Encyclopedia of the Cold War at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

I haven’t had a chance to attend many Cold War International History Project events in the past year — the last one I attended was for the launch of Charles Gati’s Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt — so I’m looking forward to this one.

The Portable Edmund Burke, edited by Isaac Kramnick

Finally had a chance to finish this review, which was sitting in my files for longer than I’d liked. Finishing my review of Simon Jenkins’ Thatcher and Sons is next on my list, though I may have an older review available to slip in for Sunday.

The Portable Edmund Burke, edited by Isaac Kramnick

In the late 1700s, the British House of Commons contained a number of notable politicians whose friendships, rivalries, and ongoing intrigues might not seem out of place in today’s newspaper columns and political talk shows. The modern forms of today’s political party systems were still in their infancy, but their origins can be seen in the accounts of arch-rivals Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger facing each other across the floor of the Commons, as their respective groups of followers mobilised into constantly shifting tendencies and factions. One of the great ‘political personalities’ of the era was an Anglo-Irish MP named Edmund Burke, who had begun his political career as a private secretary of the second Marquess of Rockingham (one of several men who served very brief terms as Prime Minister in the 1760s and 1780s) but who soon developed a name for himself in the Commons for his oratorical style and his strong stances on several controversial issues of the day. The historian Edward Gibbon once described Burke as ‘the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew’, and Gibbon was certainly not alone in admiring Burke’s eloquence while simultaneously regarding many of the man’s opinions as rather beyond the pale.

In his time as an MP and a statesman, Burke was a defender of the rights of the Catholic minority in the United Kingdom, a critic of the harsh practices of slavery in Britain’s West Indian colonies, and a supporter of the grievances of the American colonists against the British crown. He also denounced the conduct of the British East India Company and its corrupt administration of the terrorities it had conquered on the Indian subcontinent. In the mid-1750s, he even wrote the essay A Vindication of Natural Society, a rationalist critique of Britain’s traditional social order that he would later claim was a piece of political satire, not meant to be taken as an indication of his personal beliefs. (This claim has since been disputed, though it works well enough as satire.) Yet in modern times, Burke is perhaps best known for his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a polemical letter-essay written in November 1790 which condemned the events and philosophical underpinning of the French Revolution in no uncertain terms. His fierce opposition to the French Revolution made him highly unpopular with many of his friends and political allies, most of whom found it surprising that he would support the tenets of American Revolution but denounce the revolution that followed in France. Later commentators, however, would identify Burke’s Reflections as one of the fundamental documents that laid out the philosophical basis of modern conservative thought — its emphasis on the guidance of tradition and the existing social order as opposed to outright revolutionary change provided a basic underpinning of the various schools of conservatism that would develop in the years to come.

Isaac Kramnick, editor of The Portable Enlightenment Reader, has developed this volume of the Viking Portable Library to include a representative selection of Burke’s writings, illustrating Burke’s thoughts on social and political topics ranging from the abuses of British colonial power in India and the Americas to the radical philosophies of writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the proper conduct expected of members of Parliament and the aristocratic leaders of Great Britain. Kramnick’s introductory essay to this volume is an exceedingly good addition to Burke’s writings, primarily because it looks at how different historical schools of thought have regarded Burke and his philosophies in the centuries that have passed since his death. (In essence, American historians are more likely that their English counterparts to look favourably on Burke’s philosophical contributions, in large part because of the influence of Sir Lewis Namier’s re-evaluation of the history of Parliament in George III’s era.) For those who only know of Edmund Burke through his Reflections, or through the reactions of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine who regarded Burke as worse than reactionary, The Portable Edmund Burke is a fine, compact means of looking at the expanse of the man’s writings and evaluating them on their own terms.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

As I was putting the finishing touches on my review of The Portable Edmund Burke, I realised that I’d neglected to post this review, which I’d written several months ago. All the more reason to slip this review in first.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

When Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759, to a fairly prosperous family in what is now Spitalfields in London, she seemed to have a life of comfort and good fortune awaiting her. Yet her father’s tendency towards speculation and wasteful spending soon destroyed the greater part of the family income, and by the time Wollstonecraft reached adulthood she was faced with the plight of untold other young women of her age and social standing: she had too little money to marry well but few useful skills to support herself financially. She worked as a governess and tried to run a school for girls, then finally took a very great risk in attempting to earn a living through her writing alone. Having travelled to France to see the changes being wrought by the Revolution, she channeled much of her frustration at the conditions she saw in England into her writings. Hard on the heels of her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (written as a scathing response to Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France) came her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft addresses many of the concerns she had with the treatment of women and their education — or more specifically, the lack thereof.

Wollstonecraft makes several basic points in the book, most of which centre on the nature of women’s intelligence and a girl’s ability to be educated in the same manner as a boy would be. She roundly condemns writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who insisted that boys and girls could not and should not be educated on equal terms. It is this attitude, she claims, that is responsible for so much of the vice, ignorance, and lascivious behaviour she dislikes in both men and women. As long as women are taught that their only use in life is to be sweet, charming, and pleasing to men, they will of course go to any lengths to keep a man’s affections and attentions…even to the detriment of their children’s welfare, their family’s good name, and their own moral standards. Uneducated women teach their daughters to be flirts and courtesans, not good and rational mothers and wives. The sons of uneducated women learn that a woman is only worth something when she is young and pretty, tacitly condoning extra-marital affairs. An educated woman, on the other hand, will be more capable of caring for her children — she will be less involved in constantly trying to keep her husband’s affections, for one thing — and will likely provide her sons and daughters with the proper example to follow as they grow up to become moral citizens and rational human beings:

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers — in a word, better citizens.

Education as the backbone of moral fibre is a point she stresses over and over again, and insists that any of the arguments about women being created mentally inferior to men cannot be true. No good and gentle Creator, she claims, would be cruel enough to create a being who was allowed neither the brute instinct given to animals nor the free will and reason given to men. Even if the writing of the Vindication feels more than a little repetitive at times, Wollstonecraft’s message comes across plainly and passionately, as much a part of the works of the revolutionary Enlightenment writers as anything written by…well, a man.

The second work included in the book are the sections of Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. The ‘wrongs’ mentioned in the title include both the wrongs done to women and the wrongs done by women — the central point of the plot involves the grim fate of a woman named Maria, who has been declared insane and locked up a private asylum at the whim of her debauched, spendthrift husband. While in the asylum, Maria befriends one of the female ‘nurses’, a girl named Jemima, who has likewise suffered greatly in the course of her married life. Wollstonecraft draws parallels across class boundaries in a manner that was quite radical for her day, pointing out the unsatisfactory condition shared by poor and well-to-do women alike. While the fragments of the novel are clearly sketchy and unpolished, there is enough available to give the reader an idea of what the story might have been like — though it is difficult to tell whether Wollstonecraft intended the tale to have a tragic ending (like that of her first novel, Mary) or a more romantic ending where the heroine manages to overcome her condition.

The edition that I have (the Longman Cultural Edition) contains a selection of articles and other writings related to Wollstonecraft’s work, ranging from contemporary reviews of the Vindication to longer sections from works that Wollstonecraft cited or referred to in the text itself. The articles and snippets help to place the writings within their era, complete with annotations and explanations designed to clarify quotations or references that contemporary readers might not immediately know. If I had the opportunity to select from a few different editions of Wollstonecraft’s work, I think I would have preferred an edition which included only the Vindication and its related articles — the unfinished novel seemed (to me) overly melodramatic and maudlin when compared to the firey feel of the polemic. Even so, the Vindication is required reading for anyone interested in early feminist writings and the work of Enlightenment authors, no matter what edition it happens to be in.

Commentary: Politico’s Great Statesmen Series

I’m sitting on a backlog of not-quite finished reviews at the moment, so in lieu of rushing through the first one in the queue (which is likely to be about Edmund Burke), I’m going to slip in a bit of commentary about Politico’s Great Statesmen book series.

The Great Statesmen series is a line of reissued political memoirs and biographies of various British politicians. I’ve acquired four Great Statesmen titles in the past year, two biography (Francis Beckett on Clement Attlee and D.R. Thorpe on Alec Douglas-Home) and two autobiography (Geoffrey Howe’s Conflict of Loyalty and Denis Healey’s Time of My Life), and I’ve been very satisfied with the series’ production quality and appearance. I do quibble somewhat with the inclusion of Francis Beckett’s biography, which may be one of the more recent Attlee biographies but is by no means the most well-written. (My arguments on this front are set out in a review I wrote for the May 2008 issue of Political Studies Review.) Yet on the whole, it is very good to see a publisher taking the time and effort to put together a quality series of this nature, almost made for collecting by those who are fond of modern political history.

At the time of this writing, the main Politico’s Publishing Web site is not working very well for me. It’s a pity that the Politico’s Web site maintainers haven’t set up a separate section to show off this line, because it’s well worth the Web space. I’ve been able to compile a partial list of the titles currently available in the Great Statesmen line — I may have left out one or two, but these are the ones I have seen offered for sale online and in some bookshops.

Biography
Clem Attlee – Francis Beckett
Anthony Crosland – Kevin Jefferys
Alec Douglas-Home – D.R. Thorpe
Hugh Gaitskell – Brian Brivati

Autobiography/Memoirs
Time and Chance – James Callaghan
Time of My Life – Denis Healey
The Course of My Life – Edward Heath
Conflict of Loyalty – Geoffrey Howe
A Life at the Centre – Roy Jenkins (which I have reviewed here)

Reviews of both the Thorpe and Beckett biographies are in the abovementioned review article, and I’ll be writing a review of Geoffrey Howe’s biography for Political Studies Review in the near future. I’ve yet to start Healey’s memoirs, but when I finish that, I’ll be sure to post a review of it here.