The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
No delicate flower, but blooming good Taking cheap shots
It’s time to rediscover Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the forceful, ambitious, political poet she was There is a fascinating book to be written about the British Army’s travails since 2001. Unfortunately, this isn’t it
TWO WAY MIRROR by Fiona Sampson
336pp, Profile, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £10.59
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When Wordsworth died in 1850 and the post of Poet Laureate became vacant, one name that was widely canvassed in the press as his replacement was that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the end, the honour went to Tennyson; it would take until 2009 for the first woman, Carol Ann Duffy, to fill the post.
That Barrett Browning was in the running says much about her status in her lifetime, though her literary reputation declined after her death. Her only poem that remains widely known today is the lyric “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”; her magnum opus of 1856, Aurora Leigh, a book-length verse narrative about the life of a fictional woman writer, is largely unread except by academics. During the 20th century, she was sentimentally repackaged in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, which inspired more than one Hollywood treatment. It painted her as a delicate flower escaping from her overbearing father into the arms of her fellow poet Robert Browning.
It’s true that Barrett Browning suffered from poor health; that her father was strange; and that she eloped to marry Browning, with whom she spent the rest of her life in Italy. But this new biography shows that she was also determined, ambitious and engaged in the public debates of her day. It restores her to her proper place as one of the leading voices of the Victorian era.
Born in 1806, she was a poetic prodigy from an early age, encouraged by her wealthy family, who called her “Ba” (in a family obsessed with nicknames, she got off lightly compared with her sister “Addles” and her aunt “Bummy”).
Her childhood home was a country house built in the style of an extravagant gothic folly, but the Barretts were outsiders, not landed gentry. The money came from slave plantations in Jamaica; although the slave trade had been abolished in 1807, slavery itself remained legal in the Caribbean into the 1830s.
Some have concluded that Barrett Browning had mixed-race heritage, the result of some ancestral relationship between a master and an enslaved woman. Fiona Sampson finds no objective evidence for this. However, she confronts the troubling source of the wealth that enabled the embryonic young poet to devote herself to the life of the mind, and she goes on to show how
Her early death was probably caused by a morphine overdose, given by her husband
Barrett Browning came to espouse the abolitionist cause.
Sampson also explores how 19th-century stereotypes of femininity affected Barrett Browning in her self-creation as a writer. It would be interesting to find out more about how her literary voice compares with those of the other female poets of her era. In 1835, for instance, she addressed one of her earliest published poems to the already famous English poetess Letitia Landon, while her decision, in Aurora Leigh, to focus on the life of a fictional female poet harked back to Madame de Stael’s 1807 bestseller, Corinne.
By the late 1830s, financial reverses had led to the loss of the grand country house, and the Barretts were living in London at the now legendary Wimpole Street address, the widowed father becoming ever more controlling over the lives of his adult children. Barrett Browning’s 1844 collection, Poems, was a hit with the public, but she rarely went out, her invalidism confining her to her room.
The precise diagnosis is elusive – her health problems began in her teens with chronic pain and later included lung symptoms – but this biography is surely right to suggest that the medical treatment she received added to, rather than cured, her ills. She became a lifelong morphine addict.
Secret visits to Wimpole Street by Browning resulted in love, a clandestine wedding and their escape to Italy in 1846. He was less famous than she was, and six years her junior, in contrast to her previous, confidence-sapping relationships with older male mentors.
Their happiness enabled her to cut down on her drug intake while pregnant with their only child, a boy nicknamed “Pen”. When she died in 1861, aged 55, she was suffering from lung trouble, but the cause of death was probably an accidental morphine overdose administered by her husband in an attempt to still her suffering.
This book is an empathetic – and much-needed – reassessment which tells a fascinating story. The decision to use the present tense throughout may not be to every reader’s taste, but it underlines the sense that the biographer is bringing her subject back to life.
Most importantly, Sampson makes one want to read Barrett Browning. If Aurora Leigh hasn’t remained on readers’ radars, it is partly down to the fact that it is written in verse not prose. But it’s basically a Victorian novel with a plot, set in Victorian times. If you like the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot, you should certainly give it a go.
Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph by Lucasta Miller (Jonathan Cape, £17.99) is out now
CHANGING THE GUARD:
THE BRITISH ARMY SINCE 9/11 by Simon Akam
704pp, Scribe, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £19 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Since 9/11, Britain’s Armed Forces have been put to their most serious combat test in decades. In Iraq and Afghanistan, and latterly in Libya and Syria, Britain’s servicemen and women have often been stretched to the limit of their resilience and courage in operations against resourceful and committed foes. While both the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy have made significant contributions, the lion’s share of the burden has fallen on the Army.
As successive governments have presided over shortfalls in defence spending, Britain’s involvement in these campaigns has come to be remembered as much for the controversies over inadequate equipment – such as sending soldiers into battle in Snatch Land Rovers, which offer little protection against roadside bombs – as for the courage displayed by front-line troops. Yet in The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11, journalist Simon Akam seeks to lay the blame for these failings on the generation of Army generals and other senior officers who were responsible for prosecuting the campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
From the start of this long and clumsily written book, it is clear that the author has a jaundiced view of the Army, which appears to derive from his brief experience of a gap year commission before going to university. Anyone with a working knowledge of the military knows that training can seem dull and futile, and that military exercises are often run by those with little or no experience of live combat. Akam blames his own uninspiring experience on a schoolmaster who, while being a military enthusiast, had no actual experience of fighting in a war.
Akam’s thesis is that what he disparagingly calls “The Best Little Army in the World” is nothing more than an incompetent, class-obsessed institution mainly fuelled by alcohol. For large parts of the narrative, Akam relies on the testimony of disaffected soldiers and junior officers, tirelessly piling up stories about tanks that don’t work, training exercises that are not fit for purpose and senior officers who are not up to the job. In essence, it is a modern-day version of the Lions and Donkeys narrative from the First World War.
The whole book is based on the premise that the Army “lost” the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, whereas the reality is far more complex. As someone who covered both campaigns for The Telegraph, far from regarding senior commanders as incompetent and out of their depth, I was struck by their courage and clear thinking in the most trying of circumstances.
It was not, after all, the Army’s decision to invade Iraq and Afghanistan, but their political masters who, having made the decision to stand “side-by-side” with the neocons running the Bush administration, then proceeded to change their minds on a regular basis about the ultimate mission objectives, while all the time denying commanders the resources they desperately needed to achieve their goals. That is the real story of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is one that Akam – in his haste to heap ridicule on the military commanders who found themselves caught in a political no-man’s-land – is reluctant to address.
A more valid criticism would have been that senior generals were not sufficiently robust in standing up to their political masters. Akam certainly had a chance to raise this issue, as he was granted interviews with the likes of Lord Richards of Herstmonceux and Lord Houghton of Richmond, both former heads of the Armed Forces, as well as former Army chiefs such as General Sir Peter Wall. But rather than concentrating on their explanations of events, Akam makes snide remarks about their attire and post-military careers. Thus, when Sir Peter tells the author that, for all the challenges in both Iraq and Afghanistan, “We were not deterred from any of this, neither were the soldiers,” Akam seems more interested in the fact his shoes are highly polished and the interview is conducted in one of London’s posher clubs.
Britain’s involvement in the coalition campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan undoubtedly raises tough questions about the nation’s future capabilities for fighting a war. Unfortunately, this disappointing book fails to provide adequate answers to any of them.
DOG’S BEST FRIEND by Simon Garfield
320pp, W&N, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £8.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend,” said Groucho Marx. “Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Funny. And true. During the pandemic Britons have reached for consolations of both. Sales of printed books are at an eight-year high and puppies have doubled in price over the past 12 months. So journalist Simon Garfield is clearly on to a winner with this charming and erudite – if slightly shambolic – little book on the mutually rewarding relationship between Homo sapiens and Canis lupus familiaris.
Writing with his 12-year-old labrador (Ludo) at his feet, Garfield romps through chapters on dogs in art and literature, dogs on the stage and dogs on the internet. He pays tribute to Odysseus’s faithful hound, Argos; sniffs out the skinny on the painter Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s 1894 kitsch classic Dogs Playing Poker, and ruminates on the wisdom of Snoopy.
But he starts with the science. It’s believed that humans first began to domesticate dogs somewhere between 15,000 and 40,000 years ago. The earliest rock carvings of people hunting with dogs (leashed and tied to their owners’ waists to leave the arms free for bows and arrows) were discovered in Saudi Arabia in 2017 and date back to between 8,000 and 6,000 BC. The Victorians believed the process began when primitive men captured wolves. But in 1895, Harvard scientist Nathaniel Shaler argued that “it has been found impossible to educate captive wolves to the point where they show any affection for their masters, or are the least degree useful in the arts of the household or the occupations of the chase. They are, in fact, indomitably fierce and utterly self-regarding.”
It seems likely that, instead of being caught, some bold or hungry individuals were drawn to the food around human camps and those who learnt to please their twolegged benefactors earned more food. Over time, these dogs began to diverge in appearance from the wolves who predated upon our livestock. Snouts shortened, ears flopped and became rounded.
In 2019, the cognitive psychologist Dr Juliane Kaminski discovered an important difference in the facial muscle structure of dogs and wolves. Over thousands of years, it seems, dogs learnt to raise their inner eyebrow to mimic a sad, human expression, triggering a nurturing response in us. In recent years we have bred dogs to look increasingly like “fluffy emojis”, favouring big eyes and flattened faces. These features make them prettier but less functional. Plate-faced pugs and French bulldogs often suffer from breathing problems, while our quest to make the cavalier King Charles more dolllike has landed the majority of them with brains too big for the skulls, often causing them agonising headaches.
“Increasingly,” a trainer tells Garfield, “dogs are treated as a possession rather than a companion.” When a new client arrives with one of the latest designer dogs tucked into a handbag, she’ll say: “Get that bow out of its hair and we’ll talk…” She encourages people to see the world through their pet’s eyes by placing their mobile phones at their puppy’s eye level and recording a video as they walk down the street: “You watch it back,” she says. “It’s frightening, especially if you’re a chihuahua.”
Looking back, Garfield discovers that the names we give our pets reflect their changing status. The Ancient Greek philosopher-historian Xenophon believed short names, expressing character, were best for dogs. He recommended Psyche (Spirit), Thymus (Courage), Phrura (Guard) and Speude (Roarer). The English equivalents – Fido and Rover – have fallen from fashion over the past century, with modern Britons more likely to give their dogs the same names as their children. 2020’s top dog names –
Bella, Max, Luna and Lucy – are as likely to be called in the school playground as in the park.
Truffling for international trivia, Garfield reveals that the French Société Centrale Canine requires all registered pedigree dogs to use a naming system based on their year of birth. All those born in 2021 must be given a name beginning with S, so be prepared to greet lots of Sabines and Soleils. The dogs of the Beng tribes of the Ivory Coast are given names burdened by great expectation, including Yrelo (“Know yourself and avoid disputes”) and Bekanti (“If someone speaks ill of me I mustn’t take it to heart”).
Garfield has fun writing about the Queen’s corgis – named everything from Dookie to Disco – and
‘Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read’: a white French poodle, 1950s reminds us that Donald Trump was the first American president in more than a century not to own a dog. His first wife, Ivana, said her poodle Chappy barked whenever he approached and he has repeatedly used the word “dog” in a derogatory manner – his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, was “dumped like a dog”, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney “choked like a dog” and Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi “died like a dog”. Perhaps Trump worried that a dog would get more publicity than him. The memoirs of George and Barbara Bush’s English springer spaniel, Millie, outsold those of her owners, after all.
President Biden’s German shepherd, Major, is the first rescue dog to live at the White House. Hopefully he will raise the profile of the lowly rescue dog, as it seems depressingly likely that many of our unethically farmed and hastily purchased lockdown puppies will end up in shelters when their owners return to work. Those who stick with their wet-nosed pals will enjoy a magical bond that reminds us how to cherish the basics of existence. As the poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote of his old, thick-coated Dandie Dinmont terrier in 1941: “What share we most – we two together?/ Smells, and awareness of the weather./ What is it makes us more than dust?/ My trust in him; in me his trust.”