Virus revisited

IVO DAWNAY Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations

By Simon Schama Simon & Schuster £30

If not a curate’s egg, Simon Schama’s new book is certainly a curiosity. From its subtitle, you assume this will be a learned history of pandemics, delivered with orotund, if not verbose, panache.

With a heavy heart, you imagine that this arduous 400-page journey will begin in the Black Death, canter through the modern era, halt awhile at the post-Great War Spanish flu and end with some robust opinions around government incompetence over Covid-19.

Certainly it starts that way, leapfrogging the Middle Ages, and opening like a sky-diver landing in the lap of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, formidable, intellectual wife of Edward, HM Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople in 1716.

It was she who discovered in the seraglios the ancient Middle Eastern practice of inoculation, performed by the Circassian concubines to preserve their looks from the ravishes of smallpox.

Ever practical, she brought inoculation to England, and hence began Western Europe’s adoption of a medical trick first devised in the Orient.

From there, like a Parisian parkourist, Schama leaps to Marcel Proust’s father, Adrien. Unlike his flâneur son, burly, bearded Dr Proust was a global scientist and medical diplomat, an action man with a life of touring Europe, Russia and the Middle East in a relentless war against cholera. His singular achievement came in the 1890s, when an International Sanitary Conference he convened in Venice agreed the first ever multinational regime of measures.

It is here that Schama settles on the book’s hero – a Jewish Russian from Odessa whom we first meet as a resistance fighter against the bloody pogroms that scar his early life.

Waldemar Haffkine is also a scientific prodigy, a bacteriologist who goes on to create and deliver vaccines against smallpox and the bubonic plague that save the lives of millions.

He does so largely in India. There he pits his wits against the jobsworths of a British Raj, populated by a cartoon crew of moustachioed snobs, anti-Semites and sunburnt soldiers.

The combination of Haffkine, brilliant globalist man of science, and the likes of

Lord Curzon is a feast on which Schama’s priestly liberalism falls with famished glee and not without some justification.

After the early successes, Haffkine’s Anglo-Saxon enemies unjustly charge him with a medical cock-up that sets back the vaccination campaign and more or less ends his career in the field.

It also provides the central theme of the book – the eternal war of the ‘expert’ against the prejudices of well-entrenched civil services – liberally soused in national interests: institutional barbarism, ‘the sovereignty of the ignorant and the lazy over the persevering and the learned’. A conservative Blob.

Schama’s moral outrage at the handling of the Bombay bubonic-plague outbreak takes no prisoners. He brushes lightly over the sacrifices (and deaths) of many white-skinned do-gooders and the multiracial, multifaith Justices of the Peace who vainly if sincerely apply the wrong solutions to the unfurling crisis.

Instead, he suggests that their cack-handed efforts to save lives were motivated largely by a self-interested struggle to save the Raj.

And so to today. It being published post pandemic, one assumes that journey’s end will be our own contemporary idiot-faced administrators. But not even Matt Hancock, Chris Whitty or Kate Bingham is given the time of day.

Apart from a brief peroration about the outrageous martyrdom in the US by the Trumpist Right of Dr Anthony Fauci (with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson playing the role of Lord Curzon), Professor Schama seems less interested in the recent epidemic. Instead, he ends with a Biblical warning about Big Pharma’s exploitation of the horseshoe crab, the dangers of zoonotic infections and the unity of all life forms.

What is this all for, if not just another display of the polymathic historian’s giddy brilliance – this time for a wellinformed rootle around the science lab?

And you can’t help asking yourself, again and again, why is the author of the magisterial Citizens doing this to us?

Schama always reminds me of the boy in the front of the class, with his hand permanently raised, saying, ‘Me Sir, me Sir,’ as the teacher poses a question and the rest of us at the back pick our noses.

There are perhaps three or four long London Review of Books essays in here – but none one fears the non-specialist reader would want to read.

I love everything that’s old: old friends; old times; old manners; old books; old wine.

Oliver

Goldsmith

The makings were neatly laid out on a side-table, and to pour into a glass an inch or so of the raw spirit and shoosh some soda-water on top of it was with me the work of a moment. This done, I retired to an armchair and put my feet up, sipping the mixture with carefree enjoyment, rather like Caesar having one in his tent the day he overcame the Nervii.

Bertie Wooster in P G Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves

That calm sense of mastery – mastery over himself and others known only to those who are doing what they were born to do.

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep

The French say, ‘To know all is to forgive all.’ Well, one can never know all, and one cannot in one’s heart forgive everything but one can appear to do so and then, eventually, one forgets.

Brooke Astor

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Alfred North Whitehead

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

Karl Menninger

If you’re having a party, invite only people whose presence at it will make you happy, because these are the people who will have a good time.

Andrew Solomon, A Stone Boat

His mates at the University of Sydney became so concerned by his fondness for female company that they formed up and huskily asked him straight out if he was homosexual.

I DON’T WANT to pay for every single little item –every co ee, newspaper and bag of crisps, when I suddenly feel peckish – with my bank card.

Christopher Hitchens on Robert Hughes

There’s nothing so empty as an empty playground.

Andrew O’Hagan, Be Near Me

People long for something to report as an excuse to get in touch with those they love.

John Stubbs, John Donne: The Reformed Soul

Pierre was one of those people who, despite the appearance of what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant for their troubles, but work them out alone.

Tolstoy, War and Peace

On the whole, those who have taken drugs copiously and habitually over many years strike me as a great deal more boring and stupid than those who have not.

But to say that drugs have made them boring and stupid may be to confuse cause with effect. Most of them were pretty grim company even before they stuck that first rolled-up tenner up their noses.

Tom Kemp, Daily Telegraph

As rude as he was, he could not credit anyone else with politeness.

Julian Fellowes, Snobs

Cash-free society I am boycotting certain shops and cafés for refusing to accept cash.

The trouble is, losing money from one oldie like me will make no di erence whatsoever to these places. They cater to the young, and now increasingly the middle-aged, who never carry cash and tap-tap-tap away merrily at every card reader.

I am an oldie, and cash is tight. Everything is expensive, and I have to budget. I withdraw a certain sum from my bank every month, and I want to make that sum last until the next month. I also have an obscure fear that the more I use my card, the greater my chances of falling victim to fraudulent use of my details.

What these cash-free companies won’t admit is that refusing cash simply makes life easier – for them.

No cash in tills means no cash to count and no chasing-up of an incorrect balance. For those averse to cash machines, banks are making the withdrawal of money more and more di icult.

During the Covid lockdowns, some banks saw a golden opportunity to

Small Delights

downsize. They refused counter service – and then later claimed that branches were closing because hardly anybody used the counter service.

So I am trying to ght back. If I walk into a café, order an overpriced co ee, brandish a crisp new 20 and then am told, ‘We don’t accept cash,’ or, as a barista recently screamed at me, ‘Cards only!’, I do not obediently get out my bank card. I say, ‘OK,’ turn on my heel and walk out.

Email life’s small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk

If these companies want to lose a sale, ne. I’ll take my money elsewhere. Join with me, oldies, on my crusade to Keep the Cash!

JULIE CRUICKSHANK

Jonathan Swift vs Taylor Swift

Modern publishers prefer pop singers to brilliant writers a n wilson

G K Chesterton said the art of journalism was to interest the readers in the fact that Lady Jones was dead, when they had not previously known that she was alive.

It is not impossible that many Oldiereaders have spent the last innocent six, seven or eight decades utterly unaware of the existence of Taylor Swift. Dean Swift, of course. His surreal, undiluted misanthropy seems ever more sane to us. Indeed, every matutinal newspaper perusal, finding new evidence of the bizarre antics of our politicians, celebs and church folk, feels like reading Gulliver’s Travels

And we have fond memories of Clive Swift. Married to Margaret Drabble once upon a time, he was the put-upon husband in TV’s comedy Keeping Up Appearances, with Pat Routledge as Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced Bouquet. At a pinch, some of us might have heard of Graham Swift. But Taylor Swift? Hmm.

Popular entertainer, m’ lud. American.

A rumour recently swept through what some of the newspapers are calling ‘the literary world’. This world is not, as you might think, a world where everyone is curled up with Plato’s Republic or Racine’s Phèdre; where talented poets and prose-writers are published even though they write, like a character in Ivy Compton-Burnett, ‘for the few’.

On the contrary, it is the brash and almost boundlessly philistine world of commercial publishing, shored up by TikTok, Amazon and social media.

The spectre that’s haunting this strange world is a memoir, released on 13th June, by Flatiron, an imprint of Macmillan. The working title is 4C Untitled Flatiron Nonfiction Summer 2023. Costing £35, already it is top of the Barnes and Noble pre-order chart. It is second on Amazon. Why? Because the rumour was that this unenticing title is the work of the phenomenally popular singer-songwriter Taylor Swift.

The book is already destined to outsell Spare, the memoirs of that esteemed man of letters the Duke of Sussex. At a rumoured 544 pages, it is also considerably longer than the work of His Royal Highness. The fans of Ms Swift, clearly the kind of nerds who believe in conspiracy theories as well as being simply idiots, have calculated that 5 + 4 + 4 = 13; and 13, as is common knowledge, is Ms Swift’s lucky mumber.

So hundreds of thousands of people were prepared to shell out the price of an average restaurant meal for a book they have not read, and which would, quite indubitably, have been written not by Taylor Swift, whoever she is, but by a ghost writer. In fact, as was leaked about a month before publication, this nonbook was not by Taylor Swift at all, but by a boy band calls BTS.

Presumably they have their fans – but perhaps the publishers thought they’d sell more copies of the book by implying it was by the legendary Taylor Swift.

The old argument about bestsellers was that they paid for the good books on a publisher’s list that sold less well.

A publisher would be prepared to take a punt on some volume of verse, or some experimental novel, because they made their money publishing some celebrated tearaway success, such as Agatha Christie or J K Rowling.

This might have been the case once upon a time. The bestsellers, such as Christie, were proper books. But the modern bestsellers are not strictly speaking books at all. The world of publishing, dominated by conglomerates, has been taken over by total barbarians who do not care about books at all.

Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise (1938), wrote that ‘Popular success is a palace built for writers by publishers, journalists, and professional reputationmakers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down.’

Every autumn, in time for the ‘Christmas market’, they churn out a bunch of ‘celebrity’ memoirs, the ghosted recollections of singers, politicians, has-beens of stage and screen, most of which will not make a fraction of their advance. The moronic belief that such ‘books’ will keep the ‘industry’ alive actually deters publishers from daring to publish innovative or interesting stuff.

The editors who have a real feel for books will inevitably, in such a world, be sidelined. Their voices will be drowned out by the sales teams who have nil interest in books; who think the job of a good publisher is to bring out the autobiographies of Taylor Swift or Prince Harry.

Wisconsin bookshop Blue House Books offered a refund to their customers if, as it transpired, the forthcoming memoir was not by Taylor Swift but by some other celebrity.

It sounds handsome of them, but one wonders why they bothered. One of the features of bestsellers, as opposed to proper books, is that they are bought by millions, but read by – one suspects – no one.

I have never met anyone who was able, plausibly, to tell me that they had read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. And I have long suspected that the reason Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses rebounded so catastrophically on the author was that it had not been read even by the publishers. I’ve tried about five times, and it really is unreadable, as are nearly all the bestsellers, whether misery memoirs, ‘airport’ thrillers or self-help books about well-being and mindfulness.

The paradox would not be lost on Swift. Dean Swift, that is.

Publishers believe themselves to be saving the book trade by selling prodigious quantities of books that are not written, but ghosted, and which cannot, strictly speaking, be read.

Film Harry Mount

STILL: A MICHAEL J FOX MOVIE (15)

You don’t have to be a fan of film star Michael J Fox to be moved by the tale of his Parkinson’s disease.

Fox was at the height of his powers, aged only 29, with the Back to the Future films under his belt, when the disease struck.

‘How could I have this old people’s disease?’ was his reaction.

For seven years, he kept the news quiet from the movie studios – and his fans. Now, though, the films he was in then have an added poignancy. He could mask the Parkinson’s if he held his limbs still or carried something – that’s why he’s so often holding his wrist, looking at his watch or grasping a bottle.

The disease started slowly – ‘The trembling was a message from the future,’ as he wittily puts it – before becoming the all-encompassing horror it is now.

You see him walking down the streets of Manhattan, bent over and scuttling, before an agonising fall on the pavement when he turns to say hello to a passing fan. He struggles to squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush.

Parkinson’s is a nightmare for anyone, and particularly for an actor. It’s sometimes hard to hear him speak and he’s forever breaking things in falls –including his hand, arm and cheekbone.

Now 62, he is admirably vanity-free and open to the most direct of questions from the director, Davis Guggenheim.

With his quick, self-deprecating wit, Fox tries to take the edge off his horrible predicament. At one point, he talks about the public reception to the news about his condition and says, ‘I find it extremely moving – no pun intended [given the vigorous shakes he can’t control].’