Category Archives: Life

Monsters: what do we do with great art by bad people? by Clare Dederer

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Summary: a fascinating exploration of the relationship between the audience and the monstrous artist

As a reader, a viewer of movies, a “consumer” of art, Clare Dederer realized young a particular problem: some great artists whose work she loved, whose work helped her understand her own life, were utter arseholes… or as she, an American type of person, puts it, “Assholes!”

Picasso, Woody Allen, Polanski, Hemmingway – the authors of some of the finest art in the Western traditions had done dreadful things to other human beings. Polanski – survivor of the Holocaust, bereaved husband of a murdered wife, was also a child rapist. And yet the quality of their art was still so overwhelmingly seductive it was impossible to resist. 

Do they make great art in spite of being arseholes or because of it?

Plainly you do not have to be a dreadful human being to be a great artist. That’s why God made Dolly Parton – so we don’t forget.

But Martha Gelhorn, Hemmingway’s third wife, herself a legendary war correspondent – way better than Hemingway at that profession – made an interesting observation: perhaps some of these arseholes might be working to produce great art in an effort to justify their otherwise mean and squalid existences. Even the arsehole can be self-aware. 

In a world in which getting read is such a struggle, perhaps some of them have worked out that being a “bad boy” is a way of getting attention for their work. It is also of course possible that they are overindulged, and that is a bad thing to do to any man. I mean, most of us are still basically 14. 

Robert Caro has observed that power does not corrupt, it reveals. Hence the power that comes with being a successful artist can truly reveal the nature of the personality. 

So, it is also a percentages thing. There are a lot of arseholes about. Odds are some of them must be geniuses. 

This book has been criticized for some lack of intellectual coherence – most of the female artists Dederer discusses are hardly in the same category of monstrousness as some of the men, and there is no evidence that Nabokov ever hurt a fly – though the monster he created is an outstanding literary exploration of the banality of the evil that some of her other subjects represent. It has also been criticized for limited research. But how much more research do you really have to do to demonstrate that Stephen Fry can be an awful eejit on frequent occasion? And it is still an entertaining introduction to some great art and artists: for example, I have never wanted to read Lolita, and now I feel don’t have to.

In the end, Dederer concludes, the problem of loving great art, great artists, is but a subset of the problem of loving other human beings: we are all flawed, some of us dreadfully. Yet we still undeservedly love and are loved. 

And, even if I can still do without Manhattan, then, as Dederer rightly, I think, concludes, art such as Chinatown, Crimes and Misdemeanours, and Guernica all make our own flawed existences a little richer. 

Prague: getting medieval on you

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Summary: some say that a djinn is imprisoned for all eternity beneath the Charles Bridge, and troubled times might yet stir the Golem once more

St Nicholas
The rooftops of old Prague
Passageway by Malostranská Beseda
Beneath the castle
Approach
Sunrise on Charles Bridge
Entering the Old Town

Gerry McQuade

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In memorium – February 2024

When we were discussing the funeral arrangements the other night, our Brian said to me, “You need to say something … something from Seamus Heaney.”

So, I suppose for my Da there can only be one Heaney poem, and that is “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

It’s not just that, as our Geraldine and Eilis will tell you, his mantra through life was “tell them nothing”, a habit developed, no doubt, growing up in mid-Armagh during some of the vilest years of this statelet, “besieged within the siege,” as Heaney put it. 

And, it’s not just because that poem is about the Troubles which overshadowed so many of our lives and shaped his politics. 

It is more that, I think, my father’s philosophy was to let your deeds, your life, speak for itself. 

We’ve gotten all sorts of very kind messages over the past couple of days from people my Da taught, telling us how much he affected their lives, how he gave them the confidence to become the people they are today. 

That was his politics: it was practical non-violence. In the face of state and paramilitary atrocities his response was not to meet like with like, but to teach kids to work hard, to do their sums and become in themselves the new Ireland for which we all hope and strive. 

Our father could barely speak English towards the end there. As the poem says, that voice of sanity really had grown hoarse. But it doesn’t matter now. Because we still have his life. 

His deeds live on in the kids he taught and in others who teach children to read even in these bleakest of days. 

And, no matter how little he would ever say about himself, or could say towards the end, those are things that truly do speak for themselves. 

Some stocktaking – 3

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Summary: well, what have I been up to

About 12 months into lockdown, during the plague, I thought it would be a good idea to think about what if anything I had achieved during that period of enforced isolation. A year or so later I repeated the exercise and found it quite therapeutic. About 18 months later, I thought it was about time to have another reflect. So, what have I achieved?

  1. My father died in February 2024. I managed to deliver his eulogy – mostly – without crying.
  2. Having read Susan Sontag’s On Photography (A LOT!!!) I think I worked out how to, occasionally, take a decent photograph. 
  3. I had received an honorary OBE in 2017 for services to the eradication of slavery. I sent it back in protest at the British government’s and Opposition’s clear repudiation of the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, most notably for migrants and Palestinians. 
  4. Probably the British government paid no attention, I mean they have a state to plunder and a genocide to facilitate: those things don’t happen by themselves. But, at time of writing, no deportation flights to Rwanda have taken off. 
  5. Best books I read? Well, My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor is just outstanding. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy is wonderful: it’s a classic for a reason. James Kestrel’s Five December’s is an empathetic and original take on the detective in war-time sub-genre. My pal Lara Pawson’s book, Spent Light, is an extraordinary and intimate examination of everything from toasters to love to war and atrocity, to the joys of a good broom.
  6. And then there is Ellen McWilliams’ Resting Places, an exquisite exploration of the author’s people and her place, the Bandon valley, where the blood of Protestant neighbours, murdered in 1922, still cries from the ground. A remarkably courageous work on how the political and personal interplay. 
  7. Roger Casement once said, “… we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form”. So I wrote on Gaza, in a vain attempt to prick the racist mindset of the war criminals.
  8. Published my second detective in war-time novel, Some Service to the State. It is about the repercussions arising from an enquiry into the fate of a missing girl in a newly partitioned Ireland.
  9. My pal, Fergus, said it was over-didactic. I said you mean political. He said, I mean over-didactic. 
  10. “Didactic” means “intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive” Example, “a didactic novel that set out to expose social injustice”. Except he didn’t seem to mean it that positively. “Didactic” also means “in the manner of a teacher….” Or, sometimes, “patronising”. 
  11. Well, I didn’t mean to be patronising. But my father was a teacher. So, if being didactic means I’m a bit like him then that is okay. 

Palatine, by Peter Stothard; Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard; Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age, by Tom Holland

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Summary: not just fun and games

Perhaps we – well … men at least – are fascinated by ancient Rome because it seems so different to today’s world, a place where cruelty was often regarded as a virtue and so many human vices were given free rein, not least as entertainment: In answer to Maximus’ question to the circus audience, we are indeed entertained. 

But perhaps we are fascinated by it because, paradoxically, the Romans also remind us so much of ourselves in our contemporary world: we see echoes of Nero in buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump; the genocidal campaigns of the legions in Gaul and Germany echo with the depredations of the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza, and the Russians in Ukraine; the fanaticism of Hamas has resonance with that of the Sicarii defenders of Masada. 

For whatever reasons, historians of other eras must envy those who have stuck to Rome and the seemingly insatiable appetite of readers for new takes on these old stories.

Palatine, by Peter Stothard, Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard, and Pax, by Tom Holland are amongst the most recent offerings of publishers to meet this ravening demand. 

Of these three highly enjoyable books, Holland’s is perhaps the most straightforward: a narrative chronicle from the downfall of Nero in 69 AD, “the Year of the Four Emperors”, through the Flavian dynasty to Trajan. This may be subtitled “Rome’s Golden Age,” but these things are relative. For example, the campaigns by Vespasian and his son Titus against the Jewish revolt in Palestine, which led to the destruction of the Temple and the mass crucifixion of much of the civilian population of Jerusalem, are a particularly chilling example of performative cruelty in the service of mass murder. 

Nevertheless, Vespasian and Titus are still remembered as “good” emperors. Which is to say they were good for Romans… in the same way as – that contemporary echo again – the British Conservative Party is “good” for rich people, and the British Labour Party wants to be “good” for some English ones. 

Palatine is something of a prequel to Holland’s book. It deals with the first Roman emperors from the perspective of the courtiers of the Palatine – the hill in Rome on which the emperor dwelt and which gives its name to the word “palace”.

The Pantheon

In particular Stothard focuses on the Vitellius family. Heard of them? Well one of them was one of the emperors whose brief reigns in 69 AD, and comic-dreadful ends, were prologue to Vespasian’s more enduring tenure. 

Stothard affects a highly entertaining gossipy style for this. In doing so he gives a sense of the court’s preoccupations through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero. These ranged from the apparently trivial – seating, décor, banqueting, rumoured love affairs – to the sinister – the growth of Sejanus’ power, the casual cruelties of Caligula. 

What all these subjects had in common were, like an ancient world Kremlinology, they indicated where power lay, who was in favour and who was out. These were questions of life and death on the Palatine. So, the creatures of court paid attention – much as today’s political correspondents claim to do to the gossip and self-serving off-the-record briefings of power-insiders.

Mary Beard covers similar ground to Stothard, but slightly differently. As with her book SPQR her subject is perhaps histography rather than history. That is, rather than delivering a simple narrative, she presents us with the evidence, discusses what it might mean, and hence what conclusions we may be able to draw.

In doing this Beard gives us intriguing factoids, such as that the first representation of the crucifixion of Jesus was in a piece of anti-Christian graffiti found in the slaves’ quarters on the Palatine. But, drawing on diverse sources, including grave inscriptions,  she also gives us some more insight on the way those denizens of the Palatine once thought when contemplating their place in the pecking order and what it might mean for their life prospects. 

In other words, Emperor of Rome is a fine work for anyone who wishes to develop their critical thinking skills, not just in relation to history, but in relation to life. 

Rome may still offer us circuses to distract from the awfulness of the present. But we can also learn from it how to recognise the ways that power corrupts fools and the cruelty that arrogance breeds. Those will remain important skills and responsibilities for citizens for as long as human society continues to exist.

Spent Light, by Lara Pawson

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Summary: “It’s quite hard to describe really. To begin with, it’s about a toaster, but it ends up being about everything,” the Kirkdale Bookshop on Spent Light.

When, about 20 years ago, I first introduced my father to the televisual masterpiece that is The Wire, his stunned reaction to the first episode was, “I have never seen anything like that before.”

This memory came back to me, more than once, reading Lara Pawson’s extraordinary book, Spent Light, because I quite simply have never read anything like this before. 

From time to time it seemed to me almost like some other  things: Maybe the notebooks portions of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines? Or some of the (allegedly) imaginative passages in Anje Krog’s Country of My Skull? But in the end it is very much its own thing – intimate, funny, at times uncomfortable, occasionally horrific, wholly original. 

It is writing that has the intensity of poetry. And so perhaps the best way to describe Spent Light is as a series of linked autobiographical prose poems, starting with a toaster but in the end being about the whole world, as the Kirkdale Bookshop put it with such brilliant concision. Along the way, Lara touches upon love, war, squirrels, atrocities, and the joys of a good broom. 

I’ve known Lara since Angola where she was a journalist during that country’s brutal civil war. So, perhaps the only unsurprising thing about this book is that it is unsurprising that she wrote it. It is a work of genius. It should become recognised as a modern classic. 

Letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

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Summary: on returning a honorary OBE

16 April 2024

Dear Prime Minister

In 2017 I was awarded an honorary OBE in recognition of my services to the eradication of slavery. I am now returning this as it is something which I can no longer, in good conscience, keep.

On 15 April 2024, your government refused to provide protections for the victims of modern slavery from your unconscionable “Rwanda scheme”. Over the past months you, as Prime Minister, have acquiesced in attacks on the European Convention on Human Rights by members of your parliamentary party. These, along with the UK’s bipartisan position on Gaza, have put into sharp focus how British policy now distinguishes between people whose lives it values, and those whose lives it disdains. 

These represent a fundamental repudiation by the UK of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are a rejection also of an enduring British human rights tradition stretching back to Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a longer tradition of rule of law that stretches back to Magna Carta. 

As such they send to the whole world a message that the UK rejects the core bases of human rights and rule of law upon which progress in human dignity, including anti-slavery action has been based for hundreds of years. This can only impede the anti-slavery struggle and embolden other governments who seek to systematically abuse the rights of their subjects and citizens, including  by the facilitation of their enslavement. 

I hope that you will yet find it in your heart to alter course and embrace and defend these British traditions of human rights and rule of law rather than sacrifice them to some ill-judged populist crusade.

Yours faithfully

Dr Aidan McQuade