How to fix the UK economy

 

Photo by Alexander Grey on unsplash.com

Will Hutton seems to have a clear idea of what needs to be done with Britain. He has written his own book (Britain after Brexit, This Time No Mistakes), and as if this wasn’t enough, in a review of two titles addressing the same problem (Great Britain? How we get our future back, by Torsten Bell, and Left Behind, A new economics for neglected places, by Paul Collier), he made several specific recommendations for getting the UK economy to grow. I’m no expert in analysing the problems of the UK economy, but it’s interesting to see what others recommend. And, in all modesty, perhaps I can add a personal angle to the conversation.

Should we worry about the UK declining?

The first assumption seemed to be that the UK needed fixing. I was struck on a holiday to rural Portugal how wealthy that country had been to create so many lovely buildings (up to around 1800, as far as I could see) and yet how poor it was when we visited (this must have been around 2010 – things have no doubt changed now). If a colonial empire was really so lucrative, was there any alternative to economic decline once the colonies became independent?

What does nationalism have to do with it?

I was struck by the way all commentators agonized about how to improve the UK economy. Does it matter? There has been much talk in government circles about encouraging pension savers to invest in UK companies, something that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. But why should anyone invest in UK shares if the performance of the UK economy is so dire, compared to the USA? I read somewhere a figure of just 4% of UK pensioni funds invest in UK stocks, and I was surprised – until I read that Canadian pension funds have an even lower proportion of investment in their own country.

But let’s see the specific recommendations first to bring British economy back to life. I’ve based it on Hutton’s review of the two books, which usefully summarizes the main arguments.

Will Hutton seems to have a clear idea of what needs to be done with Britain. He has written his own book (Britain after Brexit, This Time No Mistakes), and as if this wasn’t enough, in a review of two titles addressing the same problem (Great Britain? How we get our future back, by Torsten Bell, and Left Behind, A new economics for neglected places, by Paul Collier), he made several specific recommendations for getting the UK economy to grow. I’m no expert in analysing the problems of the UK economy, but it’s interesting to see what others recommend. And, in all modesty, perhaps I can add a personal angle to the conversation.

Should we worry about the UK declining?

The first assumption seemed to be that the UK needed fixing. I was struck on a holiday to rural Portugal how wealthy that country had been to create so many lovely buildings (up to around 1800, as far as I could see) and yet how poor it was when we visited (this must have been around 2010 – things have no doubt changed now). If a colonial empire was really so lucrative, was there any alternative to economic decline once the colonies became independent?

What does nationalism have to do with it?

I was struck by the way all commentators agonized about how to improve the UK economy. Does it matter? There has been much talk in government circles about encouraging pension savers to invest in UK companies, something that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. But why should anyone invest in UK shares if the performance of the UK economy is so dire, compared to the USA? I read somewhere a figure of just 4% of UK pensioni funds invest in UK stocks, and I was surprised – until I read that Canadian pension funds have an even lower proportion of investment in their own country.

But let’s see the specific recommendations first to bring British economy back to life. I’ve based it on Hutton’s review of the two books, which usefully summarizes the main arguments.

Will Hutton seems to have a clear idea of what needs to be done with Britain. He has written his own book (Britain after Brexit, This Time No Mistakes), and as if this wasn’t enough, in a review of two titles addressing the same problem (Great Britain? How we get our future back, by Torsten Bell, and Left Behind, A new economics for neglected places, by Paul Collier), he made several specific recommendations for getting the UK economy to grow. I’m no expert in analysing the problems of the UK economy, but it’s interesting to see what others recommend. And, in all modesty, perhaps I can add a personal angle to the conversation.

Should we worry about the UK declining?

The first assumption seemed to be that the UK needed fixing. I was struck on a holiday to rural Portugal how wealthy that country had been to create so many lovely buildings (up to around 1800, as far as I could see) and yet how poor it was when we visited (this must have been around 2010 – things have no doubt changed now). If a colonial empire was really so lucrative, was there any alternative to economic decline once the colonies became independent?

What does nationalism have to do with it?

I was struck by the way all commentators agonized about how to improve the UK economy. Does it matter? There has been much talk in government circles about encouraging pension savers to invest in UK companies, something that seems to have gone completely out of fashion. But why should anyone invest in UK shares if the performance of the UK economy is so dire, compared to the USA? I read somewhere a figure of just 4% of UK pensioni funds invest in UK stocks, and I was surprised – until I read that Canadian pension funds have an even lower proportion of investment in their own country.

But let’s see the specific recommendations first to bring British economy back to life. I’ve based it on Hutton’s review of the two books, which usefully summarizes the main arguments.

First, the government must lead as a “public investor … so that it supports private investment”. That is easier said than done. Successive governments have tried public-private partnerships, usually with disastrous results. The present government is showing itself unwilling to take responsibility, for example, with the water industry, leaving it in private hands.

“Economic dynamism is linked … to socially cohesive societies”(these are Hutton’s words, although he is paraphrasing Torsten Bell).

 It doesn’t look like that in the US, with huge variations in income but vast wealth creation for some.

We need a regional policy to redistribute wealth. Easier said than done; I was in Boston, Lincolnshire, and I’m not sure what expenditure could change things.

“Destructive privatization has run riot” – “we need to change the fiscal rules so the government can borrow for investment”. Agreed, but the current government is not placing big enough investment in place.

Raising taxes, including council tax reform, increased capital gains tax, taxing electric vehicles. Unfortunately, the new government has already demonstrated that relatively small changes are greeted with screams of woe from the wealthy.

British companies must invest more, and they must invest in longer-term projects, not just for results in the short term. Great idea, but impossible to regulate by government.

Share ownership in UK companies should include a critical mass of influential owners, who can sustain the long-term strategy of companies. My reading of any investment is that sensible investors are in the minority. The majority are looking for a quick win, without any relationship to actually building the economy.  

Pension funds should be consolidated, so they can make some more risky investments safely. I’m not sure I am convinced by this argument. Pensions are not risky investments, for the most part, even without being consolidated.

More generally, he write about “contributive justice”, the idea that citizens contribute to a common purpose. Now, at the level of a residents’ association, there is plenty of scope to provide this kind of beneficial activity. But how can I contribute to the success of the town where I live? It looks to me as though this has already been established by central government bypassing local authorities, by setting up bodes that are not directly accountable to the electorate, but which benefit from central allocation of funds – the local example is the Greater Cambridge Partnership.

Does it fall within contributive justice to invest in UK stocks? Should I express my patriotism by restricting myself to a lower pension? This hardly seems a sensible option, either for an individual, or for a pension provider.

All in all, the views of the analysts and critics don’t appear to be stress-tested against the real world, where if you make the slightest increase in fuel duty, you are confronted by mass demonstrations that bring the country to a halt. There is no justice in this, but there is mob rule that you cannot ignore. So my fear is that nothing much will happen with all the above, and in the meantime, the rich continue to find out way of staying rich and getting richer – without any redistribution of wealth.

My 2024 books of the year

 

And the books keep piling up ... some of the books I haven't even started yet

2024 has been a good year for books. I’ve written separately about my two favourites, The Voices of Morebath, by Eamon Duffy, and Witold Rybczynski’s Home: a Short History of an Idea. Both these books continue to resonate several months after I finished them, the first helping to answer the question “What is religious belief and how was it manifested in the common people in pre-reformation England?”, and the second the equally fundamental question, “What does home mean now, and when did it start having the present-day associations we have with the term?”

More light-heartedly, the discovery of the year was E F Benson’s Mapp and Lucia (1931), a truly comic novel that had me in stitches. Perhaps it’s easier to write social satire about a distant generation to our own, but it certainly seems difficult for comic novelists to achieve with the present day (at least, if Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia are typical). Benson is mercifully free of any self-importance, and his premise of elderly society women attempting to gain or maintain top social status in a provincial town is a perfect one: this is a novel of triviality, but written with such verve, and with such awareness of conversational put-downs, that you begin to anticipate the next social catastrophe. Elizabeth Mapp fails to respond to Lucia’s application for the annual art show, and whole chapters are devoted to the build-up, and consequence, of such a faux pas. It sounds insignificant, but in the hands of a skilled writer like Benson, who reminds me of Evelyn Waugh at his most satirical, it  has a glorious verve to it. 

I read that Miranda July’s All Fours, a novel that appeared on several critics’ books of the year, has comic elements, but for me any comedy was outweighed by the narrator’s monstrous egotism. Except, perhaps, for the joke that by the end of the novel, she hadn’t even reached the menopause she so dreaded. 

In complete contrast, Fin de Siècle Vienna, a series of essays by Carl Schorske, was heavy going (no reading aloud!) but rewarding. I bought it to accompany a trip to Vienna during the summer, and it added a whole dimension. I am no expert in the complicated emergence and fortunes of Austria-Hungary during the 19th- and early 20th centuries, and I needed to create my own notes of terms, people and events, to make sense of it, but it was worth the effort. Schorske has the knack of taking two historical figures, such as the writers Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and finding remarkable similarities and differences between them, such that these contrast build up an impression of the society and politics of the period. The crucial comparison is the essay on the Ringstrasse, the famous circular road around the historic centre of Vienna, and two of the urban designers involved in its construction, Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner, the former a traditionalist, the latter a modernist. Similarly, Schorske’s chapter on the early years of the state of Austria finds unlikely parallels between three contemporaries, Georg von Schönerer, Karl Lueger, and the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, as he charts the tragic decline of democratic institutions and thinking during the early 20th century. One of the most impressive tools Schorske uses is the apposite quotation. Quotes appear in one location, then are recalled in a different context where they become hauntingly significant. Thus, Hofmannsthal: “Politics is magic. He who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him they will follow.”; or Freud’s “If I cannot bend the higher powers, I shall stir up hell” (the epigraph to his The Interpretation of Dreams, a quotation from Virgil; Virgil was referring to the River Acheron). A haunting book, Fin de Siècle Vienna depicts the steady descent of a nation to some of the most shocking events of the 20th century.

Of course, all my efforts at reading were dwarfed by Jane’s completion of A la recherche, by Proust, all seven volumes and 1.5 million words of it (not all in 2024, I hasten to add). I’ll leave to her the task of formulating a critique, and I look forward to it.  

The Future of Dinosaurs (David Hone), an interesting overview of the prehistoric animals, by an academic palaeontologist, was enjoyable, but read like a research proposal (“If only we had more specimens, more evidence”) rather than an attempt to tell us what we do know. Nonetheless, it contained some interesting details, when the author managed to get over his excessive qualification of results. Some dinosaurs had lips, but no ability to move them. We have more specimens of Anchiornis (a feathered troodontid) than any other dinosaur, but that doesn’t stop the world writing about Tyrannosaurus, with (according to the author) only 12 good complete specimens found, which means that a lot of what is written is guesswork.  

In summary, I’ve learned during 2024: something about dinosaurs, a lot about Austria-Hungary, the English Reformation, even something about the back-stabbing that takes place in a small English coastal town. But I can’t say I’ve learned much more about the menopause. 

Lucy Prebble, The Effect (Corpus Playroom, Cambridge)

 

Photo by Anna Shvets (CC0)

The Effect was great fun: entertaining (for the most part) to watch, with some good ideas. The plot is quite straightforward. Connie and Tristan, two twenty-somethings, have joined a medical trial which involves them being given increasing doses of an antidepressant drug. They interact, and the question is, is their interaction caused by the dopamine released by the drug, or is it a natural attraction?

That would be quite sufficient for a theme, but it’s not sufficient for a full West End play, which requires two hours. So the plot is, in my opinion, rather artificially thickened, to no great effect. The subplot is that the two doctors, one in charge of the trial (Dr Toby Sealey) and the doctor actually carrying out the trial (Dr Lorna James) had an affair some years ago. I found this subplot less convincing, perhaps because I was watching a student performance, in which the younger roles are always easier to cast than parts for 40- or 50-year-olds.

Prebble has a fine ear for dialogue, and writes some sparkling exchanges between the two young participants. It’s the classic contrast of higher-educated versus lower-educated, with all the corresponding differences in attitude and expectations, and performed brilliantly by the young actors, who are on stage most of the time. It reminded me of Shaw: the ability to construct a lively dialogue out of the simplest of scenarios.

There are some interesting puzzles to clarify, possibly just the clever decisions by the playwright to challenge your expectations. Of course the young man tries to get off with the young woman. Of course, the young woman is suspicious. But everything about the boy is not what it seems. He’s called Tristan, unlikely for someone from Wood Green in Essex, although it no doubt ticked a significance box for the author. More surprising, he turns out to be a believer in God, unlike her. And when rejected, he makes it clear that this is not a quick affair, but the love of his life. This is, for me, where the play begins to break down. I don’t see any justification for the two to stay together for life; I just can’t see it working. Where did eternal love come in? She has studied psychology and sociology, while he appears to be from the University of Life, although he is clearly an excellent learner.

The need to extend the play led to the introduction of some less essential material. Once the couple had got involved, their subsequent discussions were, for me, somewhat convoluted – what did they need to talk about? Even more cumbersome was the situation of the junior doctor, Lorna James. Whatever her background, her character didn’t quite gel for me, and it didn’t seem to matter too much to me if she did or didn’t resolve things with the older doctor.

The play throws in references to the ethics of medical trials (“you’re only interested in a side-effect if you can sell it!”), depression, and as I mentioned, attempts a subplot between the two doctors. But the main story is what gripped me. Its theme is summed up in a marvellous exchange between the two principals. She claims he is only attracted to her because of the drug. She says that if he were drunk and made a pass at her, she wouldn’t take it seriously. He replies that males only make a pass when they are drunk because they are too shy to open up normally. Of course, there is some truth in both arguments. Prebble’s achievement is to combine the two so that both are believable – until they fall in love for ever. 

Woman of the Year (1942)

 

Seems like a classic case of American anti-intellectualism. Spencer Tracy (Sam Craig) and Katherine Hepburn (Tess Harding) are both journalists working for the same newspaper. He writes a sports column, while she writes on global affairs. The contrast could not be greater. She speaks many languages, he just one. She intermingles effortlessly at parties, while he communes with other sports reporters at a local bar. He is boring, unimaginative, uninterested in world affairs – probably like most of the audience. 

The principle of not alienating your audience comes into effect here. Do we praise the intellectual and leave everyone in the cinema squirming in their seats, wishing they had paid more attention to their studies? Certainly not: we look for every opportunity to take the intellectual down a peg or two. Therefore, the film puts him in the ascendent with all this. Walter Brennan plays the bartender, and, of course, we warm to him. 

However, there are some slight variations on the anti-intellectual theme. Hepburn is not depicted as asexual. Her first appearance in the film begins with the camera lingering on her legs, and we are invited to think she is clearly aware of the sexual impact of those leg; this is an intellectual and a sexual being, a remarkable combination for 1930s Hollywood. 

The ending of the film is  woeful. Apparently, the final scene was tacked on by the studio, after early screenings were not liked. The audience, and the studio, wanted to see on screen Hepburn being put firmly in her place. It shows Hepburn trying to make breakfast and causing havoc. The scene goes on too long, but conveys the main point: intellectuals can’t cook. Tracy, in contrast, shows us he knows how to cook, although he does not take kindly to cooking for others – he is asked to cook not just for Hepburn but for the assistant, Gerald (Dan Tobin). Clearly, it’s not a man’s job to cook for others. 

As so often in Hollywood, the movie Is memorable for some of the character actors. Gerald, Ms Hepburn’s assistant, has just the right combination of snobbishness and efficiency, implying a put-down just by his manner. Gladys Blake, the woman who shoos the party away from the wedding night has just a few seconds of dialogue, but sorts everyone out with wonderful efficiency.

The final agreement, which we are expected to accept, is that she is not Miss Harding or Mrs Craig, but Tess Harding Craig. Hepburn, replying that “I think it’s a wonderful name”,  makes it clear she has accepted her inferior status. It’s the age-old story, the taming of the shrew.

Compared to the Hollywood screwball comedies, this film is low on jokes but high on relationships and trying to demonstrate solid principles. We listen to the wedding ceremony in great detail, as if this is one of the fundamental gospels of American life. 

Most actors claim only to be following the script, or the director. Yet, apparently, Hepburn chose this story, this director, and was complicit in this ending. I can’t help feeling that the Hollywood stars I want to remember are those that revealed some independence from the system, not those who abandoned their principles in pursuit of stardom. This film is nothing less than the capitulation of someone exceptional - a Woman of the Year, no less - to a position of inferior wife. 

A Citizens UK meeting

 

From the Citizens UK website: smiling citizens interacting

I’m always interested in events and ways in which people interact, so when I was invited to a Citizens UK meeting, I went along. The confusion started there, however, since the meeting was actually entitled a Weaving Trust meeting.

What is a Weaving Trust? Nothing to do with weaving, although a comparison was made during the evening, with mentions of wefts and warps, which I didn’t quite see the relevance of. The meeting was enjoyable – it’s always fun to meet new people – but I was left afterwards rather mystified about what the meeting was trying to achieve. This post is an attempt to try to understand what Citizens UK is about. 

What happened at the meeting

We (about 20 of us) had a series of 1-to-1 conversations, lasting about six minutes each, starting with general chat, as a way of getting to know each other. Then we had conversations with others about issues such as hopes and fears for our community. By the end of the evening, about two hours later, we had practised our arts of rapidly getting to know others – in fact, it must be just like speed dating, although, I hasten to add, I have no experience in that area. I will say, however, that those partners I spoke to who managed to talk about themselves for the whole six minutes would not be the ones I would choose to talk to again.

By the end of the evening, what had I learned? This event was at a local C of E church (other venues have included a college and mosque), and, perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the participants were involved with the Church in some form. That doesn’t invalidate the evening, but the mix of people was somewhat one-dimensional.

I felt we had got to know each other, but for what purpose? The Citizens UK website describes (and someone in the tea break confirmed this) that the idea of the group is to get together to eventually campaign on “issues”. But we didn’t discuss what these issues might be! From the website, I gathered, some groups in other areas have taken on issues such as misogyny and Islamophobia on the Underground, which of course would be worth campaigning about. But, typically, you don’t form a group and then think about an issue’

What interests me is exactly what happens in practice when you have an issue to discuss. For example, I observed a group of residents in our street campaigning for the local authority to provide planters for the pavement, since the houses have no front gardens. I was surprised to hear the negative comments from some residents: “people will just throw rubbish in them!” “The leaves from the trees will block out all the light”. My interest, then, was not how to campaign, but what to do about disagreement. It looks to me like any issue you care to mention will have people with an opposite view. How do we resolve that? The answer, or at least one potential answer, came almost accidentally, from an interfaith counsellor at a local university. She described how religious groups can come together by recognising difference; you can’t reconcile religions, but you can accept and learn about different practices and points of view. Now that’s an interesting angle, which might be a way forward … but only if we agree which issue we are talking about !

Even an issue such as “taking action on Islamophobia and misogyny on public transport”, which I wholly support, looked to me to be an unlikely target for our group, since pretty much everyone in our group would accept this should be eliminated – clearly, the people in this meeting weren’t the ones causing the problems! A wider group might reflect a bigger range of opinions, but I don’t imagine the kind of people who would shout racist slogans would be people who joined a Citizens UK group.

I was intrigued to learn more about the organisation. Citizens UK appears to operate on a membership model, but membership is only for institutions. How does that work? We came to this meeting as individuals, and I for one am not a member of any of the suggested groups who were invited to become members.

One further question: how is this operation funded? The website is pretty slick, with pictures of citizens happily interacting, and the event had refreshments and lots of clever people presenting it. Are they all volunteers? It turns out this operation, or at least much of it, is funded by The National Lottery Community Fund, which would explain how the group can have 16 local organisations (Cambridge is just one).

Finding out more

Looking for “Weaving Trust” I came across a report by Amanda Tatersall, based at the University of Sydney, “a globally recognised social change researcher and community organiser”. The project has for its goals three strategic aims:

1.      Develop leaders

2.      Strengthen institutions

3.      Make change

This sound alarming! It sounded to me when I read it much like early Fascist groups in Italy or Germany. Why develop leaders when we were carrying out an exercise in communication?

I’m happy to be corrected about any of the above, but I can’t help feeling that if I come away after two hours having to look up what this initiative is all about, perhaps others will have the same response. 

Visiting Rye with Pevsner

 

It’s always a pleasure to look at towns with Pevsner (The Buildings of England) in hand. For this trip, I used the original edition of Sussex, dating back to 1965. Today, of course, the series has greatly expanded and the feel of Pevsner has been greatly diluted. I don’t have the latest volume of Sussex for comparison, but I would guess that the text is at least 50% longer, and the text coverage much more comprehensive. But it is not only that the later editions have more text. As Pevsner explains in the Foreword, he only did East Sussex, while Ian Nairn wrote West Sussex, which enables the reader to compare the two approaches. In an interesting comment, Pevsner writes: “Mr Nairn has a greater sensibility to landscape and townscapes than I have, and he writes better than I could ever hope to write. On the other hand, those who want something a little more cataloguey and are fervently interested in mouldings and such-like details, may find my descriptions more to their liking.”

 

Well, Pevsner covers the Rye in around 1,400 words (three and a half pages). This is amazingly concise. The perambulation of the town omits many buildings that in the later edition would certainly have a mention, not just the more recent buildings. Most intriguing is where Pevsner pauses, to see the workings of his mind when he spots something that interests him. Generally, Rye is covered with simple brief mentions, although he notices the widespread Rye checkerboard pattern of red and black bricks. He only really pays attention to three buildings in the whole town, apart from the church: the Town Hall, the old Grammar School, and the Old Hospital.

While for the most part he records dates and styles of buildings, no doubt following the working notes prepared from him by his dutiful, but not necessarily inspired, assistants in advance of the perambulation, for these three buildings he seems to come to life. It is certainly dating and detail that fascinates him.

The Old Grammar School

For the Old Grammar School, he is intrigued by the use of brick for giant pilasters and Dutch gables. He immediately runs through a checklist of early uses of each motif, and satisfies himself that here they are “remarkably early”. For the church, as usual, the focus is on dating as well. The transepts are “still essentially Norman”. In the South transept (sorry, S transept) “slightly post-Norman (dogtooth) bits have been reset.” It feels almost as if he was too frightened to relax from his academic dates and styles focus to let go and respond to the surroundings – for pretty much everything else in Rye, we get just the  date and a few words about notable features.

You cannot help feeling that the essence of  Rye hasn’t been captured. Rye, which was full of visitors on the Friday and Saturday we visited, is one of the great exemplars of a rural English town; but you feel somehow that Pevsner would never have lived there; not enough issues of dating and precedence to engage him fully. 

In contrast, Pevsner shows almost no interest in Lamb House, one of the largest buildings in the town (“clearly of the early C18 with its panelled parapet and its angle pilaster strips”). Of course, even if the building is unmemorable, the situation is astonishing. The view from the living room facing the church is right along West Street; you could not hope to have a more central location in the old town. You can’t help feeling this must have had an effect on Henry James’ writing. Why otherwise seek out this obscure rural location and live there for 19 years? 

Pevsner’s introduction is sketchy and raises as many questions as it answers: “The E part of the town has largely disappeared, owing to the action of the sea”, yet the town “started to diminish in the second half of the C16, when the harbour silted up”. For him, the two themes of Rye are the brick, already mentioned, and “the open view to the plain”. Actually, for a hill town, there is not much of a view to the plain. There will be a view from most of the private gardens facing S or W, but the only large-scale public view in Rye is to the E. For example, I was not able to make out Camber Castle, about a mile to the W, when looking from the old town.

In contrast, Nairn is highly aware of the surroundings, whether positive (“Up Waltham … a wonderful group in a download valley … from the S, church, farm and barns look like a monogram in flint”) or negative: “Southwick … A bit of everything and not quite anything … The genus loci seems to have gone on strike, or to have been locked out.” As the man himself states, Pevsner feels his primary role is to establish those dates: which giant order of pilasters came first, Rye, Kew, or Blickling? And I have to say, I’m not really that bothered. I'd be more interested to know what Rye represents to all those day trippers.  

 

Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986)

 

Bertha Wegmann, The Artist's Sister, 1882

Top marks to Rybczynski for choosing such a great topic: “home” is something we all think we know, and take for granted, but which doesn’t quite correspond with anything we learn in our academic studies. Nobody studies “home”. He describes it as follows: ““This book is an attempt … to discover … the meaning of comfort” [p vii], and indeed he does (on the very last page) define the term, but his book achieves more than that. In the course of describing how architecture and interiors moved towards our present-day ideas of comfort, it is at the same time a very revealing depiction of the architectural profession, based on Rybczynski’s own experience, which is perhaps what makes his books so readable: he is honest enough to admit when his experience clashes with his reading. When Rybczynski designed houses for clients, “I found that the architectural ideals I had been taught in school frequently disregarded – if they did not altogether contradict – my clients’ conventional notions of comfort.”

So this book isn’t just about home, or comfort; it’s about architects and their changing relationship, and sometimes actual discomfort, with the term “comfort”. It is the story of how architects followed style at the expense of comfort and technology, at some point in the C19, and as a result, have had only a subordinate role ever since, for many aspects of home design, specifically, kitchens and bathrooms. When we have a kitchen extension, the architect might design it, but we hire a kitchen designer to plan the layout. Why this split?  Because we don’t believe the architect has comfort as the main goal.

In this account, Le Corbusier represents a perhaps depressing milestone in that strange divergence: the moment when the architect fails to respond to people and their preference for such things as kitchen and bathroom design, or to the intelligent use of technology. By the C20, Le Corbusier could design a house as a “machine for living”, yet turn his back on the great comfort-based innovations, and way of thinking, described by R in his historical chapters.

Criticisms

I loved Rybczynski’s book, but it has some faults. Inevitably, tackling an inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging subject such as comfort would be difficult to do with primary sources.

I would feel happier about Rybczynski’s text if he provided better citations, and better illustrations. For example, he claims (ch4 p84) that the first sloping-backed chairs since ancient Greece appeared during the reign of Louis XV. It should be possible to provide pictures, in fact, a book of this kind cries out for illustrations.  

I don’t believe that comfort appeared first in C16 Netherlands – there are plenty of examples of comfort in earlier Renaissance paintings, even if they were not primarily studies of interiors. The birth of the Virgin, for example, is a common subject for depicting a domestic interior.

Hans Fries, Birth of the Virgin, 1512

Much of the book is a historical survey of interior design as it is affected by architectural styles. We begin with medieval times. As we move through history, he gives us  a potted history of major movements, which are sometimes only tenuously related to comfort. As he acknowledges, the “Georgian style” (for want of a better word) was fixed in the C19 and remains the style of comfort to the present day. Although he makes the fundamental split between comfort and style, I think he should have concentrated on that topic. For example, he makes a  clear and interesting distinction between French and English styles: the former remained formal, and based around the court, while English style was less formal and more practical (“The preference for country homes … resulted in a style of living that was much more relaxed than its French counterpart, and that eventually produced a different domestic ideal”. [p106, ch 5]. But having made this distinction, Rybczynski then continues to focus on the fashionable at the expense of comfort, by describing C20 styles that look to me anything but comfortable, such as Art Deco (although he later valiantly claims that Art Deco was more human-centred than subsequent styles such as minimalism, which wouldn’t be difficult). As an architect and architectural historian, Rybczynski tries to show some solidarity with architects, even doing his best to defend Le Corbusier, but it’s cleaer from the author’s own description that C19 architects, by concentrating on the visual, lost the opportunity to take responsibility for interior design, and never regained it. Worse, they showed little interest in technology and the infrastructure of buildings. If we want evidence of modern architects rejecting comfort, we have only to browse the many depressing accounts by family members growing up in their father’s (inhuman and impractical) architectural statement, such as Elizabeth Garber’s Implosion: A Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter (2018).

 

The present day

To complete R’s fascinating journey through architectural history from the point of view of convenience and comfort, we should move to the present day. The modern home really is a “machine for living in”, even if Le C would have been dismayed at our lack of attention to style. More important than a specific style, we expect all devices in the home to be linked, and to respond to our controls. We want to be able to play music and video from our phone to the TV. We want to charge our electric car, and to be able to control domestic appliances, such as dishwashers and blinds, with our phone. We want the home to be intelligent enough to transfer energy back to the grid when the domestic generator (from solar power or heat pumps) has a surplus above the house’s own requirement. If we want advice on all of this, do we go to an architect? I don’t think so. Architects lost touch with technology over 150 years ago. Yet the joined-up house would be central to what we today define as comfort. And comfort, in the broad sense that Rybczynski defines it, as the tailored and appropriate use of technology, has led to the growth of the design and build movement, with an architect frequently not even involved in the project. Visit any recent hotel or hospital building: these are spaces where function is far more important than any style. They do not look like designed spaces, even though they are highly functional.

Oh, and, in case you are wondering, what exactly is comfort? Rybczynski defines it as “a cultural artifice” involving “convenience, efficiency, domesticity, ease, privacy, intimacy” – whatever environment provides a feeling of well-being, in other words. 

Boston, Lincolnshire

Our visit to  Boston presented many overlapping and even contradictory impressions. Which one is the real Boston?

The Market Place presented a prosperous 18th- and 19th-century town, with an enormous parish church visible from everywhere around. A few hundred metres away was Fydell House, an impressive 18th-century merchant’s residence, with a lovely garden. The house was preserved by the Boston Preservation Society, which indeed was founded to save this specific property.

Yet, revealed the warm and engaging curator, most of the garden disappeared when Boston build an inner-city bypass, John Adams Way, built as recently as 1976, but situated pretty much through the centre of the town. There does not appear to be any other bypass. There was an aroma of dope in most of the public spaces. In the Market Place, there were many adult males in ones and twos doing very little – I guess these were out-of-work immigrants. There were several employment agencies with people hanging around outside. There were people sitting or lying in doorways. Yet, as Jane pointed out, the immigrants, largely from when the UK was in the European Union, are still here, which suggests that what they left must have been worse. 

Just a few yards from Market Place, the parish church of Boston was busy with a wide range of people visiting, games available (there was a Lego model of the church, and people playing Connect 4), and a café. We were greeted on arrival. The church, one of the largest in England, has a stunning tower (the “Stump”), and some of the most fascinating misericords (carvings under wooden seats) I have seen anywhere. They date from the 14th century; I don’t think many people notice them.

The town had hanging baskets and planters everywhere. I saw two council workers collecting rubbish from the pavements. At various points in the town there are examples of street art; the one I saw was a repurposed buoy from the channel in the North Sea on the approach to the port.

One shopping area, around Rosegarth Square, seemed to be completely derelict, with a large empty B&M supermarket. There was a sign on the wall stating that the UK Government is investing £14.8m to regenerate the square. There was no sign of any progress to date.

Pescod Square shopping centre, in contrast, was a pedestrian walkway with pretty much full occupancy by shops.

 Many of the listed buildings were in a woeful state of disrepair. One eighteenth-century house had shopfronts inserted on the ground floor, and half the sash windows replaced (but only half).

Boston’s MP, the Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice, is a multimillionaire property investor, educated (and formerly vice chair of trustees) at Uppingham School. Boston and Skegness is the most deprived constituency in Lincolnshire (although only ranked 112th most deprived in the UK, which makes me worry about the 111 below it). You could ask what connection there is between the privileged background of the MP and the poverty of the constituency he represents. Why would people vote for him? You could of course point out that many of the people sitting on the benches in Market Place would not be eligible to vote; who would they have voted for? Until 2024 the seat had always been Conservative; Tice overturned a Tory majority of over 25,000. The constituency had the highest vote in favour of leaving the European Union in the 2016 referendum.  

Before visiting Boston, I consulted guide books, and even a recent book about Lincolnshire (Edge of England, by Derek Turner, 2023), but there was no mention of the clear lack of work and opportunity here in Boston.

How can you sum up Boston, given all the above? Of course, there is no single vision of any place. But it’s a challenging question: if you were running the government, what would you do for Boston? What could you do for Boston? 

All Fours: the menopause is neither fun nor sexy

 

 

I wouldn’t mention this novel except that it seems to have become some kind of reference object, the novel about the menopause (although by no means the first). It was reviewed in the TLS, and then mentioned in the Guardian, in a piece about erotic fiction. As if that wasn’t enough, just after I had written this post, Zoe Williams, also the author of the erotic fiction article, in her regular Guardian column gave the novel a big write-up and asked, “Can menopause be fun and sexy? Yes, says Miranda July” [Guardian, 13 August 2024).

Reader, I warn you, this book is not erotic. It’s not fun, and it’s only sexy in the sense that it contains a lot of sex: most of it masturbation, if you find that sexy (and more about that later). Until I read Miranda July, I never realised how entertaining the world of Charles Bukowski was. There is no humour here.

The hero is a 45-year-old woman, a mother with a non-gendered child, Sam, aged seven, and a partner, the patient and long-suffering Harris. She starts a long drive to New York, but encounters a younger man, who works for Hertz Car Rental, and whom she fancies. However, her desire is not consummated, despite her frantic attempts, although she does manage to go to bed with one of his former partners. Panic-stricken because she believes the female libido drops off a cliff at the menopause, she agrees with her husband to have an open relationship, and has encounters with women. Some time later, she watches her non-boyfriend dance and has a kind of mystical experience. That’s it.

Most of the focus of the novel is about the concerns and anxieties of middle-aged American women, what the narrator describes as the perimenopause, and it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. FOMO is one of the anxieties: specifically, the fear that she might not want to have sex any more. The narrator pads out her self-absorption with regular exchanges with other women, finding out how they behave, and hence determining how she should behave (the author states in an afterword that the novel was partly based on a number of interviews with women).

So obsessed is the focus on the emotional state of the narrator that several aspects of the novel seem sketchy or inadequate:

• She requires a space where she can have her meetings with Davey, the would-be lover, and has a motel room refurbished at a cost of $20,000, with the work done by Davey’s partner, without (at least in the beginning) Davey’s knowledge. Her work seems to be occasional, but very well paid. There are no money concerns in the novel.
• I thought an open relationship was when you had sex with people other than your long-term partner, but for the most part, there is no sex with her partner. When the narrator achieves a sexual relationship with another woman, she behaves appallingly when her partner breaks it off.
• For the most part, the narrator behaves abysmally, taking everyone around her for granted, including her partner and child, and repeatedly texting her would-be lover in a way that would be considered stalking.
• The ending is a damp squib. Instead of consummating her desire, the narrator watches him dance in public, suggesting that the Hertz Rental assistant is really a consummate, world-class dancer; her dream man is a prince after all. In other words, this brutally realist novel, so blunt about the real-life problems of a middle-aged woman, drifts off into a vague fantasy at the end.
• Highly questionable is the hero’s attitude to stardom. She is some kind of artist, and later author, with an agent. Throughout the book, strangers approach her because of her reputation. The narrator expects special treatment as a result of her status – when she attends a performance by Davey as an invited guest, she is disappointed there is no designated area for her, but she has to sit in the audience.
• The narrator treats her child as a child-minder would: despite repeated protestations of love, the parent shows little interest in what the child does. The child is just an irritant and an interruption in the way of the narrator’s obsessions. For example, the narrator is on the phone to a friend:-           

“I have some questions about menopause and libido”.

“Where is my Lego book?” Sam screamed outside the garage door.

“Under the couch! Sorry, Mary.”  

You could not say the sex is sketchy. There is a lot of it, in a lot of detail. But sex, for the narrator, is not an equal activity. Sex is not about pleasure, it’s about winning and losing. As for the masturbation, there is a lot of it through the book, and it seems to have cast a spell over reviewers (and Zoe Williams), as if the idea that a woman might refer to masturbating as somehow liberating, rather than pleasurable. Yet the narrator doesn’t seem to masturbate for pleasure – she even admits to something I find difficult to imagine, angry masturbation (“I masturbated angrily to the thought of Harris fucking Caro”).

In short, I found the narrator an unpleasant character to be alongside. I found her neuroses tiresome, her obsession with herself very self-indulgent and unhealthy. Making the menopause the subject of your novel does not make it great. A serious theme is not invalidated by creating an enjoyable and entertaining work, and this is neither. The narrator would benefit from thinking about something (or someone) other than herself.

The Kröller-Müller Museum and sculpture garden

 

The 1970s extension

What could be more enticing than a gallery in the middle of a vast wood, where (for the most part) you have to cycle or walk to reach it? What’s more, it has a vast open-air sculpture park, with over 150 objects spread over several acres. Finally, there is a ravishing café with views over the gardens outside. The Kröller-Müller Museum has all of these, plus one of the best collections of Van Gogh.

It turns out that the story of the collection is quite involved. Helene Müller, born in Essen,  married a Dutchman, Anton Kröller, and on her father’s death, he became director of the family iron and coal company (which later includes a shipping line). Helene, Now Kröller-Müller, starts to buy art from 1905 – mainly from the 1870s to the present day, but with a few older works. Between 1909 and1917, the couple buy a vast estate on the  Veluwe. They commission H P Berlage, architect of the fabulous Hague Kunstmuseum, to build a hunting lodge (1915), but their plans for a huge art gallery are never realised. In 1935, the collection was acquired by the Dutch state, while the park became the property of a new Kröller-Müller Foundation. In 1937, a much smaller building than originally envisaged, a “Transitional Museum” was designed by Henry van de Velde (with a sculpture gallery added 1952 with large windows onto the park). This is the older part of the building housing the collection today. Helene died in 1939, and after her death a new focus on collecting sculpture began; the sculpture garden opened in 1961, and includes the ravishing Rietveld Pavilion, a reconstruction of a 1955 work shortly after the architect’s death in 1964. But what the visitor notices first today is the major new wing, by the Dutch architect Wim Quist, finished 1977. However, neither the old nor the new building really provides the space I would expect for such a major collection.

The permanent collection was, like any collection built by an individual, rather subjective. I wouldn’t have had quite so many Van Goghs (he must be the only artist to have painted the potato harvest, hardly the most visually appealing of topics) but the experience of the magical spaces was magical. Coffee and cake while looking at the trees was ravishing. And there was one sculpture room with big windows, enabling both the indoor and outdoor pieces to be seen. To the credit of the trustees who now manage the foundation, the buying policy has continued with a lot of contemporary pieces, to provide discussion, rather than run the risk of the collection being seen as a fossil (apparently, the founder herself thought the collection was complete and would never need expanding).

On visiting, the other thing I noticed was, for a building surrounded so entirely by trees and parkland, it seemed paradoxical and rather unnecessary to have temporary exhibitions (“The Wood for the Trees”) about “conversations with nature” that were filmed in forests in Finland, rather than simply by walking outside the gallery. This doesn’t seem to me to be environmentally necessary – you could have plenty of conversations with nature in the surrounding park, and save the travel.

But why complain? The building was ravishing, the setting was ravishing, and almost unique (The Burrell Collection is the only art gallery in a park that seems similar). After visiting the museum and the sculpture garden, on a wonderfully hot summer day, it seemed the only appropriate thing was to lie on the grass for a few minutes and just enjoy the surroundings, before cycling back to the car park, and back to the real world.

Bringing up Baby (1938)

 

After a few weeks of watching films made in the past few years, it was a shock to see how accomplished Bringing Up Baby was - a film made almost ninety years ago! Remarkable too was the incredible journey of Hollywood movies from silent to sound – this film was made within a few years of the introduction of sound. Yet the whole movie is based around such exquisite dialogue! What makes it so appealing is the way all the major characters, but especially Gable and Hepburn, use hesitation, interruption, murmurs, and gesture to communicate. The quality of the print is poor, the resolution appalling, but the dialogue sparkles and is on a par with anything made today. 

The narrative is fairly simple to describe. The entire action takes place within a few days. David Huxley (Grant), a palaeontologist, is about to get married. His actions and intentions are hijacked by Susan Vance (Hepburn), who manipulates matters in seeming chaos to prevent him carrying out any of his plans, wedding included. The bulk of the film is occupied by madcap farce, involving not one, but two leopards, a big game hunter, a dog, a spell in jail, and so on. Eventually, Huxley decides he has had so much fun with Vance that he would rather marry her than his fiancée.

When you watch a farce, you willingly forego a lot of your critical attitudes. If a film or play can make me laugh and keep me laughing, I am happy to ignore problems with the plot or character. But I can’t help feeling that the underlying premiss of the film is somewhat misogynistic. A woman sets her eye on capturing a man, and stops at nothing, including stealing all his clothes and sending them off to be cleaned, to ensure her success. Anyone other than Grant (a James Bond character, for example) would not tolerate for a moment being ridiculed, dressed in a fluffy dressing gown, or falling in a lake, or being sent to jail. But although Grant is repeatedly exasperated, for the purpose of the continuing laugh, he has to go along with the lunacy. Nonetheless, it leaves a bad taste. Consider one (imaginary) reel after the end of the film, when the two are married. Hepburn has shown herself to be irresponsible (for example, a wildly dangerous driver, crashing cars repeatedly, and stealing cars without concern). This is not the sort of person you would want to marry.

This is where Grant’s character is so perfect. He is the perfect male sex symbol: tall, handsome, not a hair out of place, impeccably dressed. When a man has such incredible assets, the viewers don’t want to see too much perfection. They want to see his perfection jolted, which is why he is so often in drag, or having pratfalls, and looking ridiculous: because we all know that within a few minutes he can return to being a sex god. He has the looks that we will never have, but he’s not insufferable, and able to take a joke.

One reason for the zany, surreal air of the film was, as noticed by director Howard Hawks, “there were no normal people in it. Everyone you met was a screwball and since that time I learned my lesson.” Certainly the staggering achievement of the carefully choreographed jail scene, where at various moments Grant is inside or outside his cell without anyone (including himself) noticing, is one of the funniest moments in all cinema. Without the Will Hay-like character of Constable Slocum, that scene would have fallen flat. It’s not surprising the scene took several days to film. So inured are we to the frantic action, that by the final scene, where Hepburn destroys an entire dinosaur skeleton and is held around fifteen feet up in the air by just one arm, we take it for granted, instead of being frightened.

One other aspect of the film struck me, something that is common to much Hollywood of the thirties (and later). The emphasis by Hollywood on popular entertainment is very visible here. Although Grant is a scientist, his knowledge is  mocked and he shows no ability to deal with a leopard. Even his job, palaeontologist, is mistaken by Hepburn, who calls him a “zoologist” – as if Hepburn establishes a line in the sand above which cleverness should not go. Her cleverness is all directed at getting her man, which (in populist terms) is an OK goal. Completing a dinosaur skeleton is something quirky and not really an accomplishment. Throughout the film, the populist tone is reinforced. If, like Hepburn, you are brazen enough in your actions, like stealing a car, you can get away with it without sanction. Laws are for idiots, Hepburn seems to say; if you exist on another plane, like (for example, Elon Musk) then everyday rules can be ignored. This disturbing background didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film, but I noted afterwards that the anarchy in the film is a rather right-wing, society-accepting anarchy. You can be wild, but you want to conform with the rich around you, and to be one of them. Your anarchy is not, in the end, revolutionary.

But let’s not get too serious. How many films could have lines like this. When Huxley finds out his precious dinosaur bone is missing, he complains:

• David Huxley: It took three expeditions and five years to find that one!
• Susan Vance: David, now that they know where to find one, couldn't you send them back to get another one?

The Food Museum, Stowmarket

     

A travellers caravan, restored and repainted at the Food Museum - but not much to do with food

Some museums change their name during their history, but few change their entire collection and display policy. The Food Museum is one of the few examples. It is really an open-air museum that changed its name, and its remit as it approached its 50th anniversary. It opened as the Museum of East Anglian Life, but in 2022 became the Food Museum. Their reason (according to the museum website) was “there was no food museum in the UK and we felt this was a gap we were well placed to fill.” However, despite a shiny new kitchen and display area, the museum doesn’t really cover aspects of food production outside of East Anglia. Nor does it really cover food very comprehensively. The change in title looks somewhat cosmetic – and confusing. When we visited, there was an exhibition of photographs of Lake District farms.

What’s in the Food Museum?

There is a fine collection of historic buildings, even if relatively few compared to other open-air museums: here there are 17, while the Chiltern Open-Air Museum has 37, and the Netherlands Open-Air Museum has 40. Perhaps the golden age of open-air museums is now over, as the trend has moved towards preserving buildings in their original settings. Whatever the case, it doesn’t look like Stowmarket has had any new buildings in the last ten years or so. But the focus now seems to have changed from old buildings – there is little mention of accepting new buildings in the museum five-year plan.

Does it have enough space?

One great asset of open-air museums is that you can spend all day there, take a picnic, and not feel hurried around to see all the sights. There is no shortage of space in Stowmarket: the Food Museum has 34 hectares, while the Netherlands Open-Air Museum has 44 – not so much bigger.

Is an open-air museum no longer relevant?

The Netherlands Open-Air Museum follows a similar pattern of demonstrations and working exhibits, including a dairy farm and a laundry. The Food Museum, when we visited, had a group of what looked like families and children doing some cookery, and there was feeding of the animals. But for whatever reason, the Netherlands equivalent is vastly more popular. Visitors to the Food Museum are just 63,000 per year, according to the Vision and Development Plan 2023,  while the Netherlands equivalent welcomed around 560,000 visitors per year in 2022.  That discrepancy is vast, and perhaps explains why the trustees (or the executive) decided to change the name, and the focus, of the museum: if the punters don’t come to see the old buildings, perhaps they will come for interactive encounters around food. But that’s a big if. When we visited, on a Saturday in August, there were more people on the site for a private wedding than there were visitors to the Museum.

 

The Food Museum is not just about food

It has a collection of Travellers’ caravans, wagons and memorabilia. It has a lovely non-conformist 19th-century chapel. It has a display about a local asylum. It has a 19th-century Fen drainage pump. What happens to all these? In a way, calling itself the Food Museum restricts the Museum to one theme, whereas the Netherlands Open-Air Museum is gloriously eclectic. They have a railway warehouse, a tram depot, working trams, a demonstration of 1950s healthcare, an Indonesian house – they interpret their brief very widely. The result is a glorious confusion, but it certainly brings the visitors in.

Lack of government support

Clearly, the UK is strapped for cash. The latest Charity Commission financial statement shows that the Food Museum had an income of £1.33m for the year ending March 2023. This compares with the Netherlands Open-Air Museum income of €12.5m, plus government subsidies of €14m, in all, a total of around €28m, or £24m, some 20x greater. It seems astonishing to me, given Suffolk County Council’s moratorium on any funding of museums, that the Food Museum survives at all. It certainly doesn’t get the level of subsidy available in other countries.

What is the future of the Food Museum? I wish it well, but I think the decision by the board to change the title and scope has increased the problems faced by the museum. Perhaps the answer is just to install a tram, like the Netherlands Open-Air Museum.

A vintage tram takes the visitors around the Netherlands Open-Air Museum

 

The Netherlands Open-Air Museum

 

A lovingly recreated 1970s Amsterdam cafe 

The Nederlands Openlucht Museum, near Arnhem, is huge operation. More than 150 reconstructed buildings, over an area of 44 hectares, in fact an area so big there is a regular tram service (with vintage trams) all around the site (staffed by very welcoming tram drivers, I should add). It is a whole-day visit, since it will take you several hours just to get round the site. A major bonus is that several of the buildings don’t just have volunteers to describe that house and activity, but several of the major buildings are fully operational, such as the butter factory, powered by a boiler driving a pulley system for all the various activities involved with making butter and cream, and the steam laundry.

Is it an unqualified success? Not quite. The scope of an open-air museum is incredibly broad. Sadly, one challenge of the open-air museum is because its very existence is the least of all evils. Open-air museums came into being to house the buildings that planners and authorities wanted to demolish. The resulting resiting of the building is often in a meaningless location, for example, a water pump where there is no natural need for water to be pumped. The most recent example for the Netherlands Museum is a residential block from Amsterdam that was for years inhabited by immigrant workers, largely Turkish. It was rebuilt here because Amsterdam didn’t want it at the original site. However, in recreating the buildings, it was difficult to recreate the original living conditions, which are in contradiction to the rather grand façade of the building. Only a handful of the rooms are open to the visitor; there is one room, with bunk beds for multiple workers, which is moving; but I can’t help feeling that some eye-witness and/or autobiographical accounts would be better still. Some things just can’t be recreated very well.

There is a guidebook, but this simply repeats the information on the captions for each building. This information is very light on regional patterns and variations, and indeed there does not seem to be any attempt to create a representative survey of all the regional building types. Nor, of course, are the buildings from one region placed near each other. But the Museum makes things more difficult still by trying to accommodate all views. Thus, they try to consider the users of the buildings, as well as the buildings. This means a 17th-century building used as a Chinese restaurant is recreated as the restaurant, not for its original use, and the result is quite confusing. Similarly, the first Italian ice cream parlour (from the 1960s) is loving recreated, even though it was situated in a fascinating 17th-century building. This takes the museum into anthropology and social history, and the result is something of a hotchpotch. The hotchpotch is summed up by a house devoted to Indonesians in the Netherlands, that doesn’t attempt to give any idea of Indonesian or Dutch colonial history, but instead includes a few items of nostalgic value for that community – popular LPs by Indonesian artists that were released or at least available in the Netherlands.

If you want to find out any more about the building history of the Netherlands, you will have problems finding anything in the bookshop. The Museum guide (available only in Dutch) tells you only what is already shown on the captions available at the site.

I could find nothing in the Museum shop that provided background information on the buildings, the social history of the Netherlands, the everyday life of the people. Such books (and websites and stories) no doubt exist, but the shop seems devoted to games and trivia.

Similarly a “Green Cross” building shows public health provision from around 50 years ago. The building is of little interest, but the recreated interiors and fascinating. You can smell the surgery-like atmosphere, and even see a man (discreetly arranged) having a bath in the bathhouse.

So, I loved the site. I loved the dedicated staff and volunteers, who were unfailingly helpful in answering questions in a foreign language. I can’t really complain if the incidental items overwhelm the bigger picture. Young people can get excited by the former and, hopefully, they can revisit the subjects in more detail later. I object to the story-book view of history, and the jumbling of periods between the original buildings and their later users. But I don’t doubt that the museum probably turned more people into historians than any number of textbooks. 

A painting by Rubens

 

Rubens and studio, Jupiter and Mercury at the home of Philemon and Baucis, c1620-22

The Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum has no fewer than three paintings by Rubens on the subject of Philemon and Baucis. The one I am looking at here is probably the least well-known of the three, and indeed the gallery states it is by “Rubens and Studio” rather than entirely by Rubens. But for me it has a magical appeal.

The painting stands out because of its everyday, yet arresting, assembly of people. I don’t think this is just my response; when people are shown this picture, not in a gallery, but by itself, they are interested. They ask questions about it: who is it by? What is going on? It is a sign of the painting’s achievement that it makes people sit up and take notice. So, what is going on, and why is the picture worth looking at?

The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Jupiter and Mercury are travelling the Earth in disguise, and the only people to offer them hospitality are a poor couple, with just one goose. Baucis catches the goose for supper, at which point Jupiter (on the left of the picture), reveals their identity. You can see the surroundings of the small house, with a single lamp. You see the elderly couple on the right, with Baucis caught in the capture of the goose. Overall, however, you would not describe the story as full of action.

For the artist, then, a pretty straightforward brief: four people meeting in a small room. Yet what catches the eye is the astonishing movement of the four figures in the painting. This is a painting in motion! The surroundings are cramped; we are almost squeezed into the same space as the actors themselves. The four figures comprise a kind of circle uniting them, with Mercury (wearing his hat) looking at Philemon, and Jupiter observing Baucis, who is catching the goose. Jupiter is seated, but looks incredibly tense, leaning back dramatically, with his right hand hovering over the goose, and his feet on tiptoe, not fully on the floor. He is wearing some kind of robe that reveals his muscular body as much as it hides it. You can see in a flash that this is no average country dweller.

Incidentally, the original story in Ovid states that Philemon and Baucis have no food in the house, so I don’t know where the inviting bowl of fruit that is seen on the table came from. They offer to cook themselves in the oven for their guests, another detail that this painting omits.

The look between Mercury and Philemon is especially intense, and seems to match the almost electric positions taken up by the actors. None of these people is relaxed. There is a kind of heightened reality about this moment  - it is very clear that the painting has captured a very precise and key moment in the story. All four actors are busy in some kind of motion, even Philemon, who does not appear to be speaking, but who must therefore be one of the most active listeners on the planet. He is concentrating fiercely on his conversation with Mercury.

So here is a small-scale scene, with none of the subject matter or grandeur usually associated with Rubens. Yet he brings to it such a Baroque swirl of movement that we, the viewers, are caught up in this magical, moving world, and for a brief moment we imagine ourselves right in the middle of this moving story. It shows how Rubens could bring the most mundane, everyday moment to life, and to immediacy. 

Teju Cole, Open City: breaking the rules of fiction?

Photo by Siegfried Poepperl on Unsplash

This novel, Cole's first, is a remarkable leisurely depiction of urban life, seen from a single perspective. It’s something like W G Sebald for cities. The narrator has a job as a psychiatrist, but for most of the novel we accompany him as he walks around New York, a true flaneur in the style of Baudelaire, observing and commenting on people he knows, but as well, observing city life – the people usually ignored in fiction.

The narrator, like the author, is Nigerian-American, which means he has a multiplicity of viewpoints with the people he interacts with. One of the fascinations of the novel is how the narrator appears seamlessly to be part of different communities: the classical music buffs at Carnegie Hall (he knows all the major Mahler conductors) as well as strolling around the Bronx and Harlem (and getting mugged by teenagers in Central Park).

Most of the novel is set in New York, except for a few  weeks in Brussels, another city, when the author has a fleeting sexual encounter with a stranger. It’s rather peculiar that he makes sure he is anonymous – he uses a  false name for the encounter. Come to think of it, there is a common theme of names throughout the book. He is constantly repeating names, forgetting the names of people he met, even the woman he has sex with:

Afterward, she told me her name:  Marta, Esther? I forgot it immediately.

All this is fascinating.. The narrator is a sensitive, reflective, rather passive, observer of events. The same seems to apply to his own relationships. He has a kind of girlfriend, Nadege, but she doesn’t make an appearance in the book, and they break up early in the story: “It  was painful, this breaking apart, but it surprised neither of us.”

To be honest, the narrator’s passivity drives me up the wall – I can’t help feeling he prefers to run away from any involvement.

But Cole commits, to  my mind, a fundamental error in a fiction title, a breach of the rules of fiction. It all the more astonishing since, right at the end of the novel, we learn something about the narrator that is totally out of keeping with what has come before. He is at a party, and meet a woman, Moji, who he knew many years before. She accuses him of forcing himself on her when he was only 14 and she was 15. While, she claims, he never mentioned it again, she has lived with this harm ever since.

Before this episode is introduced, the narrator appears to exonerate himself in a characteristically long-winded aside that turns out to be relevant to what follows:

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy … whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.

And he concludes this long discussion:

From my point of view, thinking about the story of my life, even without claiming any especially heigtend [sic] sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good.

Immediately afterwards is this bombshell of an accusation. What jars is not simply that he should be accused of behaviour so diametrically opposed to everything we have learned of the narrator to date. It is that he does not rebut what his accuser says; he simply moves on, and we get a long account of a Mahler performance that seems to me to be avoiding the issue. If someone claims you violated her, should you not respond? Or, if this is a novel, should you not think to yourself (we are granted the narrator’s ability to reflect and review his own thoughts, in the narrative structure) about what has been said?

Instead, we get absolutely nothing: no mention from the narrator if this accusation is correct or false. Surely we have a duty as humans to respond, not simply to run away from such claims? By the end of the novel, my thoughts are not about the sensitivity of this observer of city life, but the weird fictional structure by which the narrator is accused but refuses to respond. It’s deeply unsatisfying.