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Every continent has them: members of the verkrappt tendency. So let’s stay down there in Australia for a while longer and meet a man who goes cheep cheep. I refer to Jeff Sparrow. He’s got it into his head that attitudes to terrorism today are rather like superstitions about witches during the early modern period. Towards this identification Sparrow offers the now well-rehearsed move according to which…

… fatalities from terrorism remain vanishingly rare, at least in wealthy nations. You have four times the chance of being struck by lightning as you do from being killed by a terror attack. You are nine times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit; you are eight times more likely to die at the hands of a police officer than a terrorist. You are also something like a thousand times more likely to lose your life in a car crash than from a terror plot.

And so on. Never mind that choking to death on your own vomit is not something generally brought about through violent attack intended as lethal by its perpetrator, and that car accidents are accidents. Never mind, also, that terrorist attacks justified in the name of jihadist ideology now constitute a global phenomenon which people going about their business are entitled to be protected from by governments, and which any citizen of a democracy should condemn outright without pooh-poohing it as mere superstition. The string of such attacks over the last decade has been more than enough to convince all but the verkrappt.

But, no, for Sparrow terrorism isn’t an existential threat and… ‘Hence the comparison with witches’; hence ‘the theological response to terror’. He never explains why a threat needs to be existential to merit being opposed on every continent, and indeed he lacks the self-consciousness to spot the oddity of his own complaint that Australians are being influenced by the Woolwich murder, when he – cheeping Sparrow – is sharing his opinions on Comment is Free, not short of its own contingent of sparrows.

That there are problems in the ethics of war thrown up by drone technology is not in doubt. Earlier this year I posted a link to a piece by Michael Walzer that discussed some of them: in particular, the danger of constraints being lowered against the killing of non-combatants. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago, Waleed Aly, lecturer in politics at Monash University, also makes reference to this aspect of the issue, but he then goes on to propose a rather extraordinary notion:

Whatever the truth of these claims and counter-claims, perhaps the best objections to drone warfare have nothing to do with pragmatic arguments over counting bodies. The central problem is drones permit a kind of no-risk, low-cost warfare. Indeed, they so radically and fundamentally alter the nature of war that they risk making war seem far less grave, and far easier to wage.

War is a kind of contract. Each side confronts the other, with the risk of death and defeat. In short, war should come at a cost. That contract is shredded when you’re attacked by something that cannot itself be killed. It’s not remotely a fair fight. It’s scarcely a fight at all. For all the horror, pain, and gore of the battlefield, there’s something to be said for it. It’s one of the very best reasons every nation has not to go to war. The greater the sacrifice, the graver the decision to fight. That’s why the Vietnam War – fought by people conscripted into the army – was so much more toxic for the US government than the Iraq War. You’re more likely to proceed with a strike based on sketchy intelligence if you’re risking only the lives of faceless civilians, and not any of your soldiers. The prospect of waging a war without sacrifice is a frightening prospect. It makes war that much more disposable; that much closer to being waged on a whim.

Where Aly gets the idea of war being a contract involving a fair sharing of costs between the two sides is beyond me. This would mean, for instance, a country with air superiority forswearing the use of it, not using tanks against infantry, only fighting tough wars and not potentially easier ones. It’s a fanciful notion, foreign to the realities of warfare.

In Celia Brayfield‘s nine novels she has reworked the plots of Cosi fan Tutte and She Stoops to Conquer, set stories in the Ballets Russes era and on a volcanic island in 18th-century Spain and explored the crisis in masculinity in the London suburbs. She has also written five non-fiction books, of which the latest is Writing Historical Fiction, to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in December 2013. A former journalist, Celia will be guest-editing the December 2013 edition of MsLexia. She teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Below she discusses Colette’s Chéri.

Celia Brayfield on Chéri by Colette

In Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, among the abundant ivy and oddly healthy feral cats, lies a great slab of porphyry, like a double bed with a dark red cover. Whenever I’ve seen it, there has been a posy of flowers wilting at the foot. The headstone, or headboard, reads ‘Ici repose Colette’. The introduction to my 1962 Penguin edition of her novel, Chéri, begins, ‘In France, Madame Colette is accepted as a national glory.’

Chéri was the novel that regenerated Colette’s polymorphous career for the fourth time. It was published in 1920, when she was 47, and was, at the outset, a work of pure imagination, the story of a love affair between an ageing courtesan, Lea, and the son of one of her friends, more than 20 years her junior.

The belle-époque demi-monde may be a sentimentalized Baz Luhrman set to us now, at a distance of both time and culture, but Colette never overlooks the inequity, cruelty and corruption under the bejewelled surface. Chéri himself is the human product of a society in which men have all the economic and social power and women have only the temporary leverage of sex. Chéri’s mother lucked in with him. ‘His birth mysteriously brought wealth to the house,’ although his father is never named. He grows from a child valued only for his cherubic beauty into a selfish, shallow, vicious but alluring young man.

Read against the author’s biography, Chéri is the same boy as the bratty child in Colette’s libretto for Ravel’s opera L’Enfant et les Sortileges, isolated by his own childish cruelty and crying out for ‘Maman’. Lea is at first the maman who feeds him up, laps him in comfort, catches the lit cigarette as it falls from his fingers when he slips into a doze in her boudoir. Her métier is luxurious comfort and sex seems only part of that at first.

And then Chéri, or Fred Peloux to give him his real name, has the opportunity to move up, to leave behind his mother’s circle of arthritic ex-ballerinas, wrinkled old tarts and evergreen toy boys and marry into the mainstream. His passport to the bourgeoisie is a young heiress who falls in love with him. Lea is used to giving up lovers – the ritual involves a formal farewell dinner with langoustines in cream sauce – and at first expects to give up Chéri without a second thought.

Like Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the novel asserts the ability of the human heart to feel pure love no matter how deeply the protagonists try to drown their feelings in moral corruption. Lea and Chéri separately are blind-sided by passion. Neither can feel alive until they are reunited. What they took for a passing sensual liaison proves to be a deep devotion. Which is not to say that their story ends happily. A sequel, Le Fin de Chéri – sadly translated as The Last of Chéri – is even darker.

When I first read the book as a teenager I loved it for many reasons. The subtlety and elaboration of emotion is extraordinary, especially to one for whom love is in the future. The storyworld is rich, elaborate and sensuous, with the flowers, clothes, jewellery and food as sharply observed as the manners and mores. Above all, this was the world from a woman’s perspective, the same world I knew from Maupassant, Balzac, Hugo and Dumas fils, but which suddenly seemed external and heartless, almost a lie, in comparison. La Dame aux Camellias, over which I shed serious tears, came to read as a moralizing and masculine attempt at the same theme.

Colette herself became an inspiration to the women of my generation who knew that the life of a 1950s housewife would not be for them. Like Madonna – there’s a physical resemblance too – Colette explored the boundaries of gender without fear but with an astute awareness of the market value of scandal. She had a good teacher in her first husband, under whose name her first novels, the Claudine series, were published. These frothy, lesbian schoolgirl romps are both authentically female in sensibility and shaped to contemporary male fantasies.

The Claudine series gave her fame, fortune, independence and the entrée to artistic Paris. By the time she wrote Chéri, Colette had moved through a number of relationships with both men and women of distinction, as well as a career on the stage, and was married to an aristocratic newspaper proprietor. In a strange instance of life following art, she began an affair with her stepson just as she completed the book.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Do you happen to remember that tree waiting for spring that I posted in March? Well, spring was duly sprung and today we went back to check out how the tree was doing. I think it’s fair to say it’s doing fine.

Born in communist Czechoslovakia, Dalibor Rohac is unsettled by the continued displays of the symbols of communism by people on the political left. In view of the millions of victims of communist regimes, he finds it difficult to understand the surviving taste for the hammer and sickle, Che Guevara t-shirts and the like. Rohac mentions some possible explanations for this: that few people grasp the magnitude of the crimes of communism; that, whereas totalitarian fascism was always a poisonous idea, communism may be seen as a good idea that went wrong – one with clear links to principles of universal justice.

But despite these suggestions of his, he is right to be unsettled. A good idea gone wrong as may be, communism didn’t just go wrong in some minor or insignificant detail, but on a vast scale, and the manner in which it went wrong wasn’t only the manner of what one calls a ‘mistake’; it became mired in the worst kinds of moral corruption and criminality. No one with a genuine attachment to humane ideals should want to be associated with, much less bear upon their person, the iconography in question. It should have been completely discredited.

At the same time, for my part I do not find it so difficult to understand why this hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened, because the left is far from having rid itself of those tendencies towards apologia for dictatorship and disregard for human rights that prevailed in the mid-20th century, or distanced itself from that constituency within which such stuff is still par for the course. What was said yesterday about Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Pot, etc is reheated and dished up again, be it in relation to contemporary tyrannies like Iran or to movements that engage in murdering civilians at random and other horrors. There are always voices on the left ready to justify or excuse these regimes and movements. Moreover, we are not talking here, as is sometimes alleged, of only a small fraction of the left – the far left: unreconstructed Stalinists, the SWP and its penumbra, and so forth. They form, to be sure, a core region of the anti-democratic indulgence I mean. But it also has a large hinterland among well-meaning ‘liberals’ (in the loose and relativist sense), and among the considerable numbers on the left who regard such apologists as entirely reasonable interlocutors, when their cavalier disregard for democratic principles ought to be a sign that these are dubious allies if allies at all.

The regrettable fact of the matter is that too much of the left still gives anti-capitalism and/or equality priority over the norms of democracy, liberty and human rights; and this is why the iconography tainted by the deaths of millions of innocent people is still seen as being cool where it no longer should be.

Bobbie Gentry badly wants to go to town, so she’s asking her old boy to take her, in ‘Papa, Won’t You Let Me Go To Town With You?‘

Chorus
Papa, won’t you let me go to town with you
Papa, I’m feeling so down and blue
You just gotta come around, please do
Papa, won’t you let me go to town with you

There’s a blue dress at Dindy’s I’d give the world to see again
I need some hand lotion and some powder from the five and ten
Buy us some chocolate and I’ll make you a pretty pie
If ya don’t let me go I’ll just die

Repeat chorus

I gotta pick up a pattern, Aunt Nora’s making me a dress
I scrubbed it this morning, what d’ya mean, this floor’s a mess?
I done everythiing you said, and then some ya didn’t say to do
You just gotta take me with you

Repeat chorus

Looky here, Papa, I found your other Sunday shoe
I shined it and shined it till it looks all brand spankin’ new
Seems like a year I’ve been waiting for today
If you let me go I won’t get in your way

Repeat chorus

Bobbie surely needs her own car.

[The Momma ‘n’ Daddy Archive, containing all the details of the series, is here.]

Today is the anniversary of the Farhud. I’m reminded by a post at Jeff’s place of one I put up two years ago, drawing on an article in the Jewish Chronicle by Sarah Ehrlich. But Jeff’s post is a good place to go to read about what was ‘the beginning of the end of thousands of years of Jewish life’ in Iraq. As he also tells us, Jews in the Arab world ‘numbered around 800,000 in 1948 and are now almost completely gone, with only tiny remnants left in a few countries and none at all in others’.

In a somewhat roundabout way, looking for a book by another Dutch writer, I recently came across two novels by Gerbrand Bakker: The Twin and The Detour. Both have won prestigious literary prizes. The Twin won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2010; and The Detour has just been announced as winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2013. I read them both, one shortly after the other, and will add my sixpenceworth of recommendation.

Bakker writes in a spare, restrained style, in which, in both books, he traces emotions of the deepest kind but that often remain unspoken between the protagonists. The Twin is about a man who lost his twin brother at an early age and the way in which the loss has affected his life and his relationship with his father, whom he now looks after in bedridden old age. The Detour follows a Dutch woman, now terminally ill, to Wales. She is much concerned with the life and work of Emily Dickinson, and she forms a relationship with a young Welshman who also helps her in the cottage and on the property she is temporarily renting. Their relationship is central to the unfolding story and produces a remarkable denouement.

If I had to choose between the books, my preference is for the second of them. But both are exceptionally good, and Bakker’s is quite different from any other literary voice I know.

In an interview at the New Republic, Clive James is asked whether he regrets having supported the invasion of Iraq and he answers:

Not at all. I thought invading Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was running it, was the thing to do. It didn’t turn out very well. It could have been handled better. It sure could. Hussein was running a regime beyond evil.

Clive James isn’t in any need of my further explaining his line of thought for him, but it’s one I understand well. The first point is evident in his saying that this was a regime beyond evil. Not to have supported its overthrow would have involved a decision with its own certain and terrible costs, though no one could know for sure in advance what the balance of consequences either way was going to be. As I think Christopher Hitchens said in a related connection, it depends on which set of regrets you prefer to have.

Second, with recent events in Syria it has become much more difficult for those who opposed the intervention in Iraq to glide over the potential costs that would have followed upon leaving Saddam in power. Towards which I offer this link (via Terry Glavin on Facebook) to a statement by Oxfam America President Ray Offenheiser on the present scale of human suffering in Syria.

I’m not going to venture into an area I know very little about with any definite view on it, but the above question arises from a piece in today’s Guardian by Giles Fraser. Fraser is writing about how religion contributes to the commission of evil by giving people a sense of rightness – ‘one of the most powerful alibis for wickedness’. Religion, he says, has no monopoly in generating this sense of rightness yet it is a frequent tendency. We need to be more ready to accept that we go wrong. In which connection Fraser says:

Because we are not God, we get things wrong. If religions understood this better, it would be a much safer phenomenon.

And isn’t that the problem, just there? The implication is that God doesn’t get things wrong. And in that case, one is committed to a belief system in which the Chief Exemplar isn’t fallible. Wouldn’t a fallible God be a better model for believers?

I leave it there as a question, with only a passing reference to my vague awareness of a Jewish tradition in which believers may – or perhaps must (I’m not sure) – argue with God. To question His ways, His sometime absence where a more interventionist presence might have been expected (e.g. in Nazi Europe), to seek the face that was hidden… well, these are scraps I’ve picked up from some, but not enough, reading in post-Holocaust Jewish theology I did a while back. My point, in any case, is this: if God may be questioned, does that not allow the possibility of His being wrong? How could it not, unless the questioning were only ever, in advance, some sort of pedagogical exercise with one possible outcome, in which the believer is brought to God’s truth? And then that would seem, to me at any rate, to enfeeble the arguing and questioning as a tradition.