Charm and its effect, even late in life

Anne-Catherine de Ligniville, Madame Helvétius, known as Minette, was reputed to be quite a character, as well as being married to one of the more controversial thinkers of eighteenth-century France. 

Claude-Adrien Helvétius was denounced as an atheist, his book burned by the public executioner. Even his name has a story: he was called Helvétius because he came from a family with the surname Schweitzer, which they presumably regarded as altogether too Germanic. Helvetic means the same as Swiss, so they simply latinised the name, making it sound much grander and less Teutonic. 

Minette. Turned a few heads but not everyone approved

Madame Helvétius was, apparently, quite a looker, and as contemporaries might have put it, no better than she should have been. 

I’ve always had a soft spot for Abigail Adams, wife of the second US President John Adams, and in my humble opinion the more interesting half of that partnership.

To be more truthful, there’s nothing in the least humble about that opinion. I hold it with complete conviction. I have no qualms about putting it out there, right here.

What I can’t deny about Abigail is that she was of somewhat Puritan stock. Rural Massachusetts, don’t you know. Late eighteenth century. They liked things just so.

Abigail met Minette while she was in France with John, during one of the latter’s diplomatic missions on behalf of the emerging American nation. The senior American diplomat was Benjamin Franklin and it was at a dinner he gave that Minette, who was highly fond of him, met Abigail, who didn’t become in the least fond of her. Franklin told Abigail that Minette was a “genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behavior”, and:

… one of the best women in the world. For this I must take the Doctor’s word; but I should have set her down for a very bad one, although sixty years of age, and a widow. I own I was highly disgusted, and never wish for an acquaintance with any ladies of this cast. After dinner she threw herself upon a settee, where she showed more than her feet. She had a little lap-dog, who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite.”

Abigail Adams
"I must study politics and war that my sons 
may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.”
I'm a fan of hers, but she was none of Minette's

I have to confess that, attached as I am to her, these views of Mrs Adams’ don’t make me think any the less well of Madame Helvétius. 

Apparently many others, and not just Franklin, thought rather highly of her at the time. A generation before Franklin, another thinker had found her fascinating. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle had been the grand old man of French science, in a life that in the end fell only one month short of a century long.

When he met Madame Helvétius, he was already in his late nineties.

"Ah, madame," he is said to have remarked, "if only I were eighty again.”

Not sure why I’ve devoted a post to that story, except that it’s Saturday afternoon. What time would be more suitable for a gentle anecdote? Especially in a blog devoted to random views.

Art for the pleasure of Art, thanks to Carl Randall

It was refreshing to hear Carl Randall speak about his paintings, at a new exhibition that has opened at the Berloni Gallery in London’s West End.

We first came across his work at the National Portrait Gallery, which had honoured him with a BP travelling prize that had enabled him to spend time in Japan and produce a series of paintings which kept us spellbound by their detail, their vivacity and their enchanting – sometimes humorous – ability to present Japanese life as it strikes a foreign visitor.

Exactly the atmosphere of bustle and liveliness of a busy Japanese station

So going to hear him speak about his paintings was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. It proved well worth it.

First of all, because he talked plainly and simply about his paintings, about his time in Japan, and above all about what he’d been trying to do. On display were more of the works we’d come to associate with him: packed with people and places, breathing life and bustle, enjoyment or concentration.

Carl Randall introducing his paintings to us
at the Berloni Gallery

But we also discovered a new side of his art. There were some swift stolen sketches of travellers in trains, absorbed in themselves, their phones, their music, or just passing the time on the way to work. 

And then other pieces, as large as the ones we already knew, but largely empty – as he explained, he was working to a more Japanese idiom, in which “negative space” (what I’ve always thought of as “white space”) isn’t shunned, but used to heighten the impact of the detailed painting. He had several Japanese ink works, on Japanese paper, in which he’d used a single model or perhaps two models, repeatedly, sketching their heads over and over, but leaving wide areas untouched. The ink sometimes ran, sometimes splashed, sometimes simply soaked differently into the absorbent paper, giving an engagingly unpredictable effect to the final result.

Japanese faces in the Japanese style
Japanese ink on Japanese paper

He’s working now on a series of fifteen “portraits of London”. That’ll be fun, to see him take on with the same verve and gusto, scenes from another country and another city, and one he knows in a very different way, as his home rather than the objective of an outsider’s visit.

But I described listening to Randall as “refreshing”. One of the more refreshing aspects was the way he kept pointing out the almost gratuitous nature of some of his techniques. He often subverts perspective, showing a large figure in the distance and a smaller one in the front.

“I do it because I like it,” he explained, “I like the flattening.”

I enjoyed that because it reminded me of many conversations I’ve had with people who’ve earnestly assured me that Jane Austen, or Graham Greene, or Salman Rushdie deliberately wrote something or other. In other words, they want to tell me about the author’s intent. But they have no idea of what the author intended and in the first two cases, they certainly can’t even ask, as they’re both dead; even in the case of Rushdie, they’re unlikely to get the chance to check, and even if they did, they might be disappointed with the answer.

So I was delighted when Randall assured us that his flattening of perspective didn’t symbolise anything in particular, except for his pleasure in doing it. That doesn’t stop a viewer seeing symbolism in it, and perfectly legitimately – a viewer, or a reader, has every right to see symbols in a work of art, and it matters not a jot that the author or painter intended none of it. After all, what something symbolises is a matter for the observer, not for the creator; if you see it, then it’s there.

But it was highly refreshing to hear an artist assure us with great sincerity that it wasn’t there because he deliberately put it there.

So we passed great hour or two, in good company, with fine paintings. 

Want to know more? Check his website.

For Remembrance Day: the Pity of War

In recognition of Remembrance Day, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning broadcast an item on Rudyard Kipling. One of the guests quoted the passage:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Remembrance Day

It struck me as a coincidence to hear Kipling mentioned on Radio 4, for the second time in a fortnight. But then I wondered whether it wasn’t a coincidence at all, but a reflection of something in the air today, a changing attitude towards the Great War. It does sometimes feel as though we’re shifting emphasis from its wanton, wasteful butchery, to something older, extolling the qualities traditionally associated with warriors. 

“Go to your God like a soldier” seems to encapsulate a certain ideal of military valour, doesn’t it?

Not that Kipling was at all impervious to the notion that a soldier wasn’t a breed apart, but merely another human, in uniform. In Tommy, he denounced the attitude of a society which despised its often ill-behaved, drunken, riotous soldiers in peacetime, but was only too quick to push them into the front line in war (“Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?, But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll”). Kipling countered:

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints…

Even so, this still feels too much like a eulogy. These are the homespun, unsung men who defend us uncomplainingly and with hard steadfast courage. With no question asked as to what right British soldiers have to be in “Afghanistan’s plains”, a matter we clearly still haven’t satisfactorily settled today.

So when it comes to questioning the notion that soldiers are heroes, rather than plain men and women suffering harrowing inhumanity, I prefer a writer I’ve not heard quoted at all in the last few weeks. He wrote a draft, incomplete preface to his poems, before he was killed just a week from the end of the Great War:

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power, except War.

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.

The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

The poetry’s in the pity. Kipling’s verse (he refused to call it poetry) is stirring, often moving. But as we think of the Great War, it seems to me the most appropriate emotion is pity, above all at waste, “the undone years, the hopelessness.”

For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled…

…I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .

It’s good to rediscover Kipling, to marvel at his verse. But when we look at World War One, let’s prefer the eyes of Wilfred Owen.

Commemoration of a futile war – and a peaceful victory

We went to take a look at the moatful of poppies at the Tower of London yesterday. 

Sea of poppies at the Tower of London
For the (British and Commonwealth) dead of WW1

It’s been criticised powerfully for being so fixated on Britain: the monument is made up of a ceramic poppy for every British and Commonwealth soldier to have been killed in the First World War. It’s true that ignoring the many millions from other nations to have died seems to be another case of putting nation above humanity. And I’ve often wondered whether in any case we focus too much on the dead: there were many survivors who suffered life sentences of mental or physical suffering as a result of the war, and far too little is said of them.

On the other hand, it was impressive. And beautiful. That flood of red beneath the walls was powerfully moving.

Oddly, today combines two commemorations. The British don’t like letting people’s noses off the grindstone, so while France has a public holiday on Armistice Day, 11 November, to mark the end of the First World War, but in Britain we have Remembrance Sunday, today, so that we can commemorate the event without having a day off.

The other commemoration? The 25th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. Interestingly it too has been marked with flowers. Not poppies, but roses, one each for leading figures who placed them in cracks in a remaining stretch of the Wall.

Angela Merkel placing a rose in a stretch of the Wall

A still more interesting contrast is in the substance of the events commemorated. 

After all, these days few of us feel the First World War achieved much that we now value. We in Europe live in a continent dominated by Germany. I’m not convinced it would have been much worse, by now at least, had we in Britain stood back and let Germany win a Continental war. The war would probably have been short and cost far fewer lives. In all likelihood, we wouldn’t have been at each others’ throats 25 years later.

In 1961, the East German government, puppet of the Soviet Union which owed its existence to a revolution precipitated by the First World War, set up a wall through Berlin, ostensibly to protect the East from Western Fascists in the West. By happy coincidence, it also prevented people from the East falling into the trap of the West and defecting to it. 

It took 28 years for it to be breached – pretty much a generation. But it cost several hundred lives not several million. On the night the wall fell, that night of 9 November 1989, not a single shot was fired and not a single man or woman was killed. As a commentator told the BBC, a member of the then politburo of the GDR has admitted that the leadership was ready for anything at that time – except for candles and prayers, which is what they got.

Despite the many failings of the present German Federation, few of us look back on the Fall of the Wall with anything but joy. Mixed with relief.

Today we in Britain stand on the brink of the first year since the outbreak of the First World War that this country has been at peace. 101 years of continuous warfare. A big moment. Of course, there are still many opportunities to screw it up and get back into some fighting somewhere. But at least we can reflect today, day of two commemorations, of how much more we seem to have achieved by not going to war with the Soviet Union, than we did by going to war with Germany.

We wouldn’t have got that moatful of poppies. But that might have been a price worth paying. 

Part of the line of balloons set up in Berlin on the line of the Wall
before they were released to mark its fall

Misty's diary: into every life a little rain must fall. But why at every door?

Another entry from Misty’s diary. In which he makes clear that he has no intention of being mocked, and will take action to prevent it.

November 2014

He's got a real cheek, has domestic number 2.

He keeps making what he thinks are smart comments at my expense. Smartarse comments, more like.

Maybe he thinks I don’t understand them. Maybe he realises I do and thinks this is a clever way of getting back at me for my judicious use of claw and tooth on him. Unwise, if that’s the case. I still have my teeth and claws, and I keep them in good order.

His latest wheeze started when the weather turned rainy. He thinks it terribly funny that I don’t like to go out when it’s chucking it down. Well, who would? He doesn’t. He grumbles about it all the time. And he’s got jackets and umbrellas to protect him. All I have is fur and let me tell you, when it gets wet it stays wet a long time.

Why, both domestics comment on it.

“Oh, poor Misty,” they say, stroking my damp back, “are you all wet?”

Yeah. Right. Duh. I’ve just been outside in the rain. Can’t hide anything from observers as acute as you guys.

That isn’t what makes Domestic 2 laugh though. He watches me get half out of the cat flap on the kitchen door and then come back in. He thinks that’s quite amusing. I suppose he thinks I’m undignified, wriggling backside first into the house.

But what really tickles him is when I ask him to let me out of the front instead.

“What?” he says, “you think conditions might be different there? That it might be raining at the back but fine, warm mousing weather at the front?”

OK, cut out the smartarse remarks
Just open the door. The weather might be nicer here

Oh wow, he thinks that’s so funny. He’s just so caustic. So bloody superior.

But I ask you? How can he actually know the weather’s going to be the same at both doors? I mean, until he’s looked?

OK, sure, it always has been. I admit that. But who’s to say it always will be? And wouldn’t we look stupid if we missed out, on the one occasion it was just glorious at the front, though it was chucking it down in the back garden?

In the meantime, let me make one thing clear.

I don’t appreciate being dissed, OK?

Now I’m going back to sharpening my claws. And making sure the teeth are filed and ready for action just as soon as I need them.

Winsome? Don't be fooled.
Just taking a break from keeping teeth and claws sharp

Happy birthday, Lise. Or how it's a man's world out there.

7th November. As well as being the 97th anniversary of the October revolution (yep, it happened in what the rest of the world thought of as November), this is the 136th birthday of Lise Meitner. Elise Meitner when she was born, but she later that she preferred Lise.

It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense wishing someone who’s been dead 46 years a happy birthday, but Meitner was a bit special, so why not? And I suppose we can have a happy birthday for her, can’t we?

Why was she special? To start with, she was an Austro-Hungarian Jew, not the most propitious of launchpads for an international career in science. Particularly for a woman. She set out to put that right quickly: she was the second woman to obtain a Physics PhD from the University of Vienna, and later she became the first woman to hold a chair of chemistry in any German university.

Lise Meitner at work

Working with a number of others, including in particular Otto Frisch, Meitner came up with the explanation of an observation of her fellow chemist, Otto Hahn’s. He had found that Uranium he was working on had a tendency to convert into the much lighter element Barium. He rightly concluded that some kind of fission, splitting, was happening, but it was Frisch and Meitner who came up with the theoretical explanation of the process.

They, indeed, came up with the notion of the “strong force” that holds protons together in the tiny space of an atomic nucleus, despite the massive repulsive power between them, caused by their all being positively charged.

After Hitler came to power, most Jewish scientists were driven out, but she was given a little breathing space because of her Austrian nationality, and stayed on right till 1938. It was a decision that nearly cost her dear: she only escaped to Holland thanks to Otto Hahn who talked the border guards into her letting her through.

She took up a scientific post in Sweden where she continued to work on the problem of fission. Many of her colleagues and fellow exiles from Germany, gravitated to the States, and eventually into the Manhattan project, designing the atom bomb. She refused to join, on the grounds that she had no wish to see her discovery used for the construction of a weapon.

In 1945, the Nobel Committee announced that the 1944 Chemistry prize was going to Hahn.

Yes, just Hahn.

Meitner didn’t get a look in.

“Surely Hahn fully deserved the Nobel Prize for chemistry,” Meitner commented. “There is really no doubt about it. But I believe that Otto Robert Frisch and I contributed something not insignificant to the clarification of the process of uranium fission – how it originates and that it produces so much energy and that was something very remote to Hahn.”

Yes. But she was a woman. A worse handicap, it seems, even than being Jewish in the scientific world of 1944.

Still. She won a lot of other awards and honours. Not least would have been Einstein's description of her as the “German Marie Curie.” It seems not unreasonable to add one more, however late, so: Happy Birthday, Lise.

NHS Savings: where they could really be made

Britain, with its quaint attachment to the style monarchical, likes to organise its medical professionals into “royal colleges”. And there is an organisation of these organisations, called the “Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.”

This morning, we learned about its report on a possible savings in the NHS.

It seems that as much as £2.3 billion a year are being wasted on over-testing and over-treating patients. £466 million is accounted for by over-prescription of cocktails of drugs – which are associated, according to the report, with 6% of hospital admissions and 4% of hospital bed days. So reducing this kind of prescribing, far from damaging patient care, should actually improve it.

From the Academy of Medical
Royal Colleges report

The report also identifies areas where savings can be made by changing working practices. For example, according to the Guardian, the Royal Liverpool hospital has halved lengths of stay simply by requiring senior medical staff (consultants) to switch from twice-weekly ward rounds to twice-daily.

On the other hand, I’m not so sold on the idea that we test too much. I’ve watched too many conditions fail to be diagnosed, in Britain, for want of carrying out simple tests. The price has been avoidable suffering or even death.

In any case, today’s Guardian quoted Dr Ian Wilson, of the doctors’ union, the BMA, who pointed out that the NHS is a world leader in cost-effective medicine. “The Commonwealth Fund, a respected American health thinktank,” the paper paraphrased him, “recently rated the NHS top for both value for money and patient care out of 11 healthcare systems worldwide it studied.”

So maybe there isn’t quite as much space for saving as the Royal Colleges believe. Perhaps only part of the £2.3 billion can really be achieved.

That’s why it was fascinating that it was also today that I read a letter sent by an MP to a constituent who had asked about the interest being paid by the NHS for “PFI” projects. The Private Finance Initiative was, shamefully, introduced by a Labour government. It was designed to push the NHS to raise finance from the private sector, for such projects as building new hospitals. It had the convenient effect of removing the loans from the total of government borrowing. 

Sadly, this wonderful advantage in pure bookkeeping was offset by a bit of a downside in the real world: it cost a great deal more in interest.

Labour introduced this wheeze, but the Conservatives, so keen on privatisation, though they denounced it in Opposition, haven’t touched it in office.

And what did the MP’s letter say?

In 2014/15, the NHS in England had an estimated £1.89 billion to pay in PFI unitary charge payments, and £1.95billion in 2015/16.

I’m sure there are savings to make by cutting out over-treatment and over-testing, or from changing work patterns. But how about eliminating that charge? It buys strictly nothing. And costs a lot.

So here’s an idea for government: suck it up and absorb that borrowing into the public debt, to free the NHS of the interest payments.

Don’t hold your breath.