The edge of vision • Gabriel Josipovici writes: The painter and writer on art Timothy Hyman has died at the age of seventy-eight. He was the most literate of artists, the author of wonderful books on a wide range of topics, including Bonnard, Sienese Painting and the Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar, as well as a gripping alternative history of twentieth-century art, The World New Made: Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century. He also curated several major exhibitions, Narrative Painting, Carnivalesque and Stanley Spencer chief among them. Like many artists he was also a part-time teacher, and his pupils at St. Martins, the Slade and in his later years at the Prince’s (now King’s) Drawing School have always been unanimous in their praise of him, frequently commenting on how he immeasurably enlarged their perspectives and how his warmth and enthusiasm helped them find themselves as people and as artists.

William Blake and Stanley Spencer were guiding spirits for him, for he shared their utopian and visionary temperament, but the deepest link, it seems to me, was with Baudelaire and his insistence that ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’. That at least was what Hyman sought to capture in his innumerable remarkable drawings of London life and in the majority of his canvases. What he loved in Bonnard (a love I shared with him) was the combination of classical French calm and order allied to the sense of things happening at the edge of vision (a child in the garden seen through the open window, a half-hidden dog towards which his wife Marthe is bending).

In the last year, after the death of his beloved wife Judith, he produced a great number of drawings, many based on medieval manuscript illuminations of the ladder of ascent to God, with Judith leaning down from above and helping a clumsy Tim (he was always aware of his size and awkwardness) climb a ladder up to her.

Thames & Hudson, who did him proud with their production of his earlier books, had just commissioned him to write a book on early English manuscript drawings, a book he was uniquely qualified to write, for only he had the requisite knowledge allied to a passion for the Middle Ages and a painter’s eye for the extraordinary beauty and power of the images, something singularly lacking in most scholarly exploration of medieval art. Sadly, that book will now never be written. But his kindness, his concern for his friends and his passion for the art he practised will continue to reverberate in those fortunate enough to have known him, while his paintings, drawings and etchings, as well as his writings, will I am sure live on when many a more famous artist will be long forgotten.


‘Always historicize!’ • Nicolas Tredell writes: Fredric Jameson, the American Marxist literary critic and cultural commentator, died on 22 September 2024 at the age of ninety. Jameson was a prolific and eloquent critical writer, moving easily across European languages and literatures, and between a range of theories and the particularities of a wide variety of literary and cinematic texts. Built ‘like a lumberjack’ (in Robert Hewison’s words), he had a no less weighty mind, but his writing was never ponderous.

Jameson was born on 14 April 1934 in Cleveland, Ohio, moving when young to New Jersey. He obtained a Bachelor’s diploma at Haverford College and, in 1959, a PhD from Yale, where he studied under Erich Auerbach, the author of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946). His doctoral thesis became his first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961), which scrutinized Sartre’s prose in minute but fruitful detail, for example considering his use of the colon and comma and its effect upon the representation of time. Jameson did not, however, centrally address Sartre’s political writings and activities in this book.

Jameson went on to publish twenty-five more books. Two of these have proved especially influential. The first, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), opens with the imperative: ‘Always historicize!’ and goes on to argue for ‘the priority of a Marxian interpretive framework in terms of semantic richness’. Marxism was ‘the “untranscendable horizon” [Sartre’s phrase] that subsumes [other] apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once cancelling and preserving them’. This opened the way to a much more capacious Marxist criticism than had previously been the case and set the terms for all Jameson’s subsequent work.

Jameson’s most influential book, published a decade later in 1991, was Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (reviewed in PNR 80), which identifies postmodernism as the ‘cultural dominant’ of the present – that is, the 1980s and early 1990s – and sees its most salient characteristic as ‘a new depthlessness’ that abolishes the distinction, central to many interpretative approaches, including Marxism, between a deceptive surface and a depth that yields the hidden truth of a phenomenon, literary or otherwise. In one of the examples that help to give Postmodernism its force and fascination, Jameson offers a perceptive comparison between Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant shoes and Andy Warhol’s ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’. Along with this ‘new depthlessness’ goes an enfeeblement of the sense of history, and the emergence of ‘postmodern hyperspace’ that challenges ‘cognitive mapping’. Jameson illustrates this by an anxiously lyrical evocation of the interior of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles: ‘the glorious movement of the elevator gondola is also a dialectical compensation for this filled space of the atrium – it gives us the chance at a radically different, but complementary, spatial experience: that of rapidly shooting up through the ceiling and outside, along one of the four symmetrical towers, with the referent, Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and even alarmingly before us’. Of course, it is difficult, more than thirty years later, to recapture the first fine careless rapture that such a then-novel space could produce; like other aspects of postmodernism, this architectural revolt against the austere geometries of modernist building has turned into a style. But Jameson’s rhapsody still captures a specific historical and cultural moment.

Jameson taught at Duke University from 1985 until his death and continued to produce essays and books, some of the latter rather loose assemblies of previously published material, such as The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (reviewed in PNR 130). But his expositions and explorations of Western Marxist thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, remain indispensable for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of that body of work. The Benjamin Files (2022), for instance, is an informed and engaging exegesis that delves into Benjamin’s well-known and less familiar texts and garners a rich experiential, cultural and conceptual harvest. Jameson’s major project, however, was the six-volume Poetics of Social Forms that includes Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism as Volume 5. In a nice reversal of expected ordonnance, the only volume still to be published is the first, Categories of the Narrative-Historical, but this will doubtless appear posthumously, along with many other items from Jameson’s Nachlass. Like the subject of his first book, Sartre, Jameson will survive the radical event of death through texts that will continue to fertilize cultural and critical debate.


One canto per evening • Hamish Ironside writes: The poet, translator and editor Peter Dale died in Cardiff on 25 June, at the age of eighty-five. He produced around fifteen collections of his own poems, beginning with Nerve in 1959, a limited edition ‘hand-set and printed in a hurry’, followed by Walk from the House in 1962, published while he studied for his BA at Oxford. After graduating he began a full-time career as a school teacher, around which he fitted a considerable literary output as poet, reviewer, co-editor (with William Cookson) of the magazine Agenda, and translator of François Villon, Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbière and Dante – the latter enterprise comprising a terza rima translation of The Divine Comedy, of which the first draft was written at a rate of one canto per evening after a long day of work. His Dante exemplifies the formal skill and inventiveness that was also evident in his own poems. Dale was described by Michael Donaghy as ‘the most underrated poet of his generation’. This reflects the sombre, introspective tone of much of his verse, somewhat at odds with the lively and humorous character he presented in person. His most supportive publisher was Peter Jay at Anvil Press, and when Anvil merged with Carcanet in 2015 (a few years after Dale had moved from Surrey to Cardiff), he published his last three collections under his own Minilith imprint. Even when increasing frailty left him largely confined to his home, he remained remarkably industrious, publishing two of his own novels (written purely for fun, but highly entertaining) with Minilith.


Torleiv Grue • Anthony Barnett writes: The Norwegian poetry editor and publisher Torleiv Grue has died on 23 August after many years of Parkinson’s and related illnesses. He was born on 7 March 1948. His main associations were with, first, the publishing house Oktober, then with the Gyldendal imprint :kolon, which he founded. Before that, he and I had worked alongside each other at the Oslo bookstore Tanum on Karl Johans Gate. I first told the story of that episode in our lives in Skal vi ta en runde til? Festskrift til Torleiv Grue, 7 mars 1998. Torleiv was a great friend and colleague to many young, often out-of-the-ordinary, Norwegian poets. He also oversaw an early translation of J.H. Prynne. An amusing aside to the sad news of Torleiv’s passing is that the H in JHP is a Norwegian name: Halvard.


The valley ahead • John Lucas wites: On 16 August the poet and writer Ann Drysdale, who had for some time been suffering from congestive heart problems, was found dead at the writing desk of her cottage in Abertillery. A week earlier she had sent me a letter telling me, inter alia, that for her forthcoming Shoestring Press collection she wanted to take as title Housman’s Rats, explaining that this came from Housman’s remark that ‘I can no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat’. Defining poetry might have been beyond her, as it’s beyond most of us, but writing good poems was very much her metier. She was a poet of wit and considerable formal accomplishment, who for years worked as a journalist, writing, so her friend Angela France notes, ‘the longest-running byline column in the Yorkshire Evening Post, which she later turned into a series of books’.

During these years Drysdale brought up three children on her own, ran a smallholding on the North Yorkshire moors and busied herself with two memoirs as well as other writing. I first met her at Calstock, at a time when she and her then poetry publisher, Harry Chambers, were very close. Harry published four of her collections and after his death I brought out a further three, all of them with wittily appropriate cover images which she had herself chosen. I was also the recipient of numerous letters, as I imagine other friends were, letters both amusing and informative about her life in Abertillery. Many of them included new poems, impish, bawdy, technically adroit, a good few of which she would go on to successfully enter for competitions in such journals as the Spectator and the Oldie. Among them was a re-writing of Cromwell’s 1653 speech dismissing Parliament, which in her sonnet version begins: ‘It’s time to close the curtain on this farce…’ and concludes ‘Now take your greedy noses from the trough – / In God’s name, lock the doors and bugger off!’ And on a later occasion, when I pointed out a few infelicities in a poem she’d sent me, I received almost by return some verses entitled ‘Guilty as Charged’, which begin ‘I am a metre-wanker’ and go on to assert that ‘I work alone with what’s my own / And tweak it till it comes’.

The last letter I received from her, written a week before her death, bears the title ‘The Pill Ritual’, and ends with her remarking that generic pills give a ‘hint of seasonal progression / to the unfolding landscape of the valley’. Not difficult to know which valley she had in mind.