Writing Reviews & Obituaries
SOMEONE told me recently that there are no rules for
writing reviews or obituaries, but Alex Dennis, the sociologist, squirmed when
I told him some years ago that the anarchist intellectual, Nicolas Walter, had placed a
number of obituaries of political individuals on the spike before he died; in
readiness for publication when it became their turn to go. Once Vernon Richards, a Freedom editor, took hold
of Albert Meltzer by his lapels at a London Anarchist Book Fair, and told him that he was going to
outlive him, promising him that he was writing Albert's obituary and that it
was going to be a good one: this
obituary was ultimately to appear in Freedom and proved very contentious.
Since I wrote the Bob Miller obituary in Northern
Voices 13, in April 2012, I have come to feel a bit sorry for Bob whose nearest and dearest have describe as 'grumpy';
I didn't find him grumpy in the least, indeed he was a bit of a softy who was
often bullied by being at the mercy of the people around him, and was
ultimately a victim of his choice of career and circumstances – yet I still
remain confident that the facts in the original obituary are basically correct and nothing has been put
forward to contradict anything in the substance of the text. Poor Bob, when I interviewed him over the
police investigation into the Brimar case he tried to say that he had little to
tell them, but just as he uttered this he was subjected to a bout of hectoring abuse from a third party who was trying to stop him speaking to me, and
above the din he struggled to say that he only knew one woman involved – a well known and respected activist in the
Manchester area, but he didn't say if he gave her name to the police and I
didn't ask him. I don't know if anyone else in his own political organisation debriefed him over his experience with the police. The only specific
rational complaint about a detail of the obituary came in a long friendly telephone
conversation I had from Tom, Bob's son, at the end of November 2012,
when he claimed that unlike Mike Ballard, he had actually said Bob was an
'anarchist' in his eulogy at his father's funeral; at my invite he agreed to
write a 400-word letter explaining this for publication in the Voices,
but the next day Barry Woodling was excluded from the Manchester Anarchist Book
Fair, accused of 'anti-Semitism'
despite the fact that his ancestors died in the gas chambers, and perhaps as a result of this Tom never
sent us his letter correcting our account.
The policy of the printed publication of Northern
Voices was established in 2003, and was to be based on the editorial
panel which would supply support, but that the detailed editorship would rest
with a single individual rather than a committee. From the first issue the 48-page journal was
divided into two with news and politics at the front, and with the back half devoted to northern arts,
literature, food and drink, and even something on northern gardens and films. Initially, in the first few issues we
published some historical academic stuff on Peterloo, and some imaginative
short stories by a talented writer called Mike Fielding. Chris Draper, who has written illuminating
essays in every issue of Northern Voices since it began, used
to complain passionately about the strict apartheid between politics and the
arts with a bias to the former. Mr.
Draper has occasionally accused us of being too 'workerist' or 'municipal' or
in the case of Mike Fielding's imaginative short stories 'ladish'. Some have even
criticised our extensive coverage of the discovery of the blacklist and our
support for the electricians in the construction industry. Yet, looking back perhaps over half of each
issue of the journal has been dedicated to the arts, history and literature,
and even some of our leading stories such as the interview with Sophie
Lancaster's mother in N.V.13 are human interest based.
Years ago, a criticism of N.V. by a reviewer in Freedom,
reported in N.V.8 in 2007, was: 'Another major criticism of the magazine...
is that it doesn't seem to carry any anarchist content', though the writer
does admit that Northern Voices is 'appealing
to a broad canvas ideal of northern working class community and history...'
Against those who want us to be more artistic
and culturally based it is worth considering what George Orwell wrote when he
was literary editor of Tribune in 1945:
'We can assume that our public is intelligent, but not that it is
primary interests are literary or
artistic, still less that our readers have been educated in the same way and
will know the same jokes and recognise the same allusions. The smaller literary
magazines tend to develop a sort of family atmosphere – almost, indeed, a
private language unintelligible to outsiders – and, at the risk of
offending a contributor now and then, we have made efforts to prevent that kind
of thing from being imported into Tribune.
We never, for instance, review books written in foreign languages, and
we try to cut out avoidable foreign quotations and obscure literary allusions. Nor will we print anything
unintelligible. I have had several angry
letters because of this, but I refuse to be responsible for printing anything I
don't understand..'
One example of what Orwell means by a smaller
arty type magazine would be The Cunningham Amendment edited by
Peter Good who was one of the founders of Northern Voices in the Summer of
2003, it is the kind of publication which has what Orwell calls a 'private
language' and with a readership which sociologists would describe as
being part of the adherents of an 'interpretive community'. Another publication of this type would
perhaps have been The Booster, which appeared in French and English and was
published in Paris between September 1937 and
Easter 1939, in which Henry Miller, Abe Ratter, Alfred Perlès, Lawrence
Durrell, William Saroyan, and Anaĭs Nin participated.
This is not the kind of thing that would appeal to the kind of person
who reads Northern Voices.
And yet, recently Steve from down South
wrote us a letter saying: 'What I like about Northern
Voices is its mixed content, it's very accessible and readable...'
Before the ship went down at Freedom, ending the
life of perhaps the oldest left-wing publication, Freedom agreed to publish a
review by the northern historian and Labour councillor Paul Salveson. The current editor Charlotte Dingle sent out
an e-mail agreeing this in October
2013, but this decision was reversed in
November 2013 on the grounds that Mr. Salveson's review was
'patronising'. Now apart from the editor
not knowing her arse from her elbow, one would have thought that it is in the
very nature of a review to be patronising in the sense that as George Orwell
says about Tribune which contrasts with the position adopted by Freedom
before it died:
'(What) is particularly important in the case of book reviews, in which
it is often difficult for the reviewer to avoid indicating his own
opinions... We hold that the reviewers
job is to say what he thinks of the book he is dealing with, and not what we
think our readers ought to think. And
if, as a result, unorthodox opinions are expressed from time to time – even, on
occasion, opinions that contradict some editorial statement at the other end of
the paper – we believe that our readers are tough enough to stand a certain
amount of diversity. We hold that the most perverse human being
is more interesting than the most orthodox gramophone record.'
Donald Rouum and Charlotte Dingle, and other
anarchists on the Freedom collective in 2014, would do well to ponder the contents
of this statement put out by Orwell as literary editor of Tribune in his New Year
message in 1945 . And the pedantic and
rather dogmatic Mr. Anonymous who wrote in a comment on the Northern
Voices Blog: 'Why would an anarchist newspaper publish something written by a Labour Party hack? exactly! They wouldn't.... Grow up and get over yourself...' would do well to consider what Orwell's has to
say below on reviews and the arts:
'Obviously we cannot print contributions that grossly violate Tribune's
policy. Even in the name of free speech
a Socialist paper cannot, for instance throw open its columns to antisemitic
propaganda. Looking through the list of
our contributors, I find among them Catholics, Communists, Trotsktists,
Anarchists, Pacifists, left-wing Conservatives, and Labour Party supporters of
all colours. All of them knew, of
course, what kind of paper they were writing for and what topics were best left
alone, but I think it is true to say that none of them has ever been asked to
modify what he had written on the grounds that it was “not policy”.'
Northern Voices has strongly supported Freedom for years, particularly when it was under attack from David Hoffman over theft of intellectual property and copywrite issues, but over a year ago we were told of crude threats to Freedom:
'don't publish or else' from a leading member of the Anarchist Federation (AF)
in London this is clearly unhealthy in a libertarian publication. This contrasts
with Orwell's more mature editorial approach at Tribune, and whose journalism has been described by Timothy Garton Ash as a 'Gold Standard' for us all to aspire to.
Of late this doesn't seem to have been the case at Freedom Press and in 2012, the manager of the Freedom Bookshop, Andy, even took Northern
Voices off the shelf and refused to sell NV13 after an approach
from Nick Heath, the AF leader. This
in itself suggests a certain intellectual and moral bankruptcy, but in the case
of the recent Paul Salveson review of Northern Voices' decade of publication, the editor
Charlotte, had at first agreed to publish the review and later withdrawn this
offer. This time there is no indication
that any external threats were applied.
This is only the latest in a long series of cases of clumsy decisions of
this kind going back over a decade in which it often seemed the different
editors of Freedom didn't know their arse from their elbow. When a publication founded in 1886 by the
geologist Peter Kropotkin begins to look like it is being managed by Snow White
& the Seven Dwarfs it begins to look like English anarchism has begun to
outlive its mission.
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