Hedging your bets

Simon Ings on an eccentric, lively study of how the power plays of French kings can be traced through their gardens

TPROOF! by Amir Alexander 320pp, Scientific American, £21.68, ebook £12.23

he fall from grace of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s superintendent of finances, was spectacular and swift. In 1661 he held a fete to welcome the king to his gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte. The affair was meant to flatter, but its sumptuousness only served to convince the absolutist monarch that Fouquet was angling for power. “On 17 August, at six in the evening Fouquet was the King of France,” Voltaire observed; “at two in the morning he was nobody.”

Soon afterwards, Fouquet’s gardens were grubbed up in an act, not of vandalism, but of expropriation: “The king’s men carefully packed the objects into crates and hauled them away to a marshy town where Louis was intent on building his own dream palace,” the Israeli-born US historian Amir Alexander tells us. “It was called Versailles.”

Proof! explains how French formal gardens reflected, maintained and even disseminated the political ideologies of French monarchs, from “the Affable” Charles VIII in the 15th century to poor, doomed Louis XVI, destined for the guillotine in 1793. Alexander claims these gardens were the concrete and eloquent expression of the idea that “geometry was everywhere and structured everything – from physical nature to human society, the state, and the world”.

If you think geometrical figures are abstract artefacts of the human mind, think again. Their regularities turn up in the natural world time and again, leading classical thinkers to hope that “underlying the boisterous chaos and variety that we see around us there may yet be a rational order, which humans can comprehend and even imitate”.

It is hard for us now to read celebrations of nature into the rigid designs of 16th-century Fontainebleau or the Tuileries, but we have no problem reading them as expressions of political power. Geometers are a tyrant’s natural darlings. Euclid spent many a happy year in Ptolemaic Egypt. King Hiero II of Syracuse looked out for Archimedes. Geometers were ideologically useful figures, since the truths they uncovered were static and hierarchical. In the Republic, Plato extols the virtues of geometry and advocates for rigid class politics in practically the same breath.

It is not entirely clear, however, how effective these patterns actually were as political symbols. Even as Thomas Hobbes was modishly emulating the logical structure of Euclid’s (geometrical) Elements in the composition of his (political) Leviathan (demonstrating, from first principles, the need for monarchy), the Duc de SaintSimon, a courtier and diarist, was having a thoroughly miserable time of it in the gardens of Louis XIV’s Versailles. “The violence everywhere done to nature repels and wearies us despite ourselves,” he wrote in his diary. So not everyone was convinced that Versailles, and gardens of that ilk, revealed the inner secrets of nature.

Of the strictures of classical architecture and design, Alexander comments that, today, “these prescriptions seem entirely arbitrary”. I’m not sure that’s right. Classical art and architecture is beautiful, not merely for its antiquity, but for the provoking way it toys with the mechanics of visual perception. The golden mean isn’t “arbitrary”.

It was fetishised, though: Alexander’s dead right about that. For centuries, Versailles was the ideal to which Europe’s grand urban projects aspired, and colonial new builds could and did outdo Versailles, at least in scale. Of the work of Lutyens and Baker in their plans for the creation of New Delhi, Alexander writes: “The rigid triangles, hexagons, and octagons created a fixed, unalterable and permanent order that could not be tampered with.”

He’s setting colonialist Europe up for a fall: that much is obvious. Even as New Delhi and Saigon’s Boulevard Norodom and all the rest were being erected, back in Europe the mathematicians János Bolyai, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann were

Louis XIV dug up his rival’s formal gardens and had them hauled away to Versailles

Something exciting is happening in British poetry, and Fran Lock is part of it. It’s a new decadent movement, a school of urban disappointment and high kitsch, of wheelie bins and black sateen; feminist, ironic, touched by the supernatural, with a glutted more-is-more aesthetic. Abigail Parry, Rebecca Tamás, Kate Potts and (at a push) Heather Phillipson are part of it. It needs a name.

Let’s call it the New Witchcraft.

Contains Mild Peril, Lock’s seventh book in eight years, offers a self-deprecating manifesto for this New Witchcraft in its final poem, “Outro”: “it’s a poetry collection read by [...] Norma Desmond flinging herself at a Victorian chaise longue”. This mood is most evident in “Giallo”, a riff on the camp glamour of Italian horror: “I was made for tantrum and for schnapps, for tenebrated/ nakedness, libidinous guignol.”

Lock owes a marked debt to Roddy Lumsden, but her painfully sharp, grounded coming-of-age poems are all her own. “Last exit to Luton” captures the voice of a cynical-but-naive teenager falling for a ghastly older man, while other poems touch on her Irish traveller background (and being abused for being a “pikey”).

Lock tends towards a long, mellifluous, iambic line, and has a turn of phrase other poets would kill for, noticing “old meat’s/ rancid rainbow” or “spring, the whole world running with green/ scissors”. But with everything turned up to 11, and the “general mood [of ] befouled defiance” throughout, it can be hard to see the poems for the poetry.

She’s best when focused on a single, concrete idea. In “Hippy crack”, the “meloid bodies” of empty laughing-gas canisters become “a litter of lead balloons”, “a nuisance pewter”. And an idiosyncratic, charming ode to her pit bull strikes a rare note of joy: “A yellow dog comes only/ once and is hisself: brilliant, final and entire.”